I’m a carnivore. Not like on the carnivore diet. Although I eat woefully few vegetables. Let’s just say that I eat enough fruit and vegetables, in combination with my vitamins and supplements, that my chances of getting scurvy are not nonexistent. I can’t not eat meat; the perfectly cooked, medium rare sirloin (or baseball-cut filet mignon) that is paired with a delicious bearnaise… All I’m saying is that I love me a good steak. I don’t need to know where it comes from, how it’s made, or anything like that.
Tender is the Flesh
Author: Agustina Bazterrica
Translator: Sarah Moses
Pages: 209
Format: Paperback
Published: November 29, 2017
Publisher: Scribner
View on Goodreads
Date Completed: November 18, 2024
My rating: 
Thoughts
This book isn’t about grass-fed bovine, though. The meat in this book is made from something more, how shall I put this… bipedal.
“Soylent Green is people!” says Charlton Heston as Detective Robert Thorne in the 1973 film, Soylent Green.
Except in this case it should be “special meat is people!” and the people would look at you like, yeah, we know.
That’s not even a spoiler since it’s on the back cover blurb.
I really wanted to like this book. I’ve seen it everywhere and it seems to get a lot of good reviews. It does seem quite divisive though – a lot of people really love it but a lot of people also really hate it. I’m somewhere in the middle.
I like (maybe like isn’t the best word) the dystopian future where there are no more animals and the human race resorts to raising “special meat” for consumption, in the form of people without first and last names. It was also an interesting commentary on the way we raise cattle, pigs, chickens, and other animals for food today. The comparison was a little lost in the story, but it was definitely there. It was just interesting to put humans in their place. Leaves kind of a bad taste in your mount. [pun most assuredly intended]
What I really didn’t care for in this book was the complete and unnecessarily grotesque scenes throughout. I get it that this is pretty much a horror story. It’s like Saw, but in prose. And Bazterrica’s prose is really great. But the story tended to meander and always seemed to end up in some disgusting place. Like a couple people getting a tour of a slaughterhouse, seeing every part of the slaughter. It just left me grossed out and disturbed. Now, I like it when books evoke strong emotions in me. But maybe not those ones. It just seems like we could have had a deeply impactful story without the gore.
It was really hard for me to rate this book, but I ended up giving it 3 out of 5 stars. While there were parts of the story (gore aside) that I didn’t care for, such as pretty much everything with the main character’s family, the prose was strong and all in all I really did care for the main character. What takes it down for me, and I did consider giving this 1.5 to 2 stars, was the gore and the ending. The freaking ending…
Agustina Bazterrica has a couple other books that I’ve seen in bookstores that seem to do okay. Maybe I’ll give her another shot someday since I did like her writing style. But for now I need a break I think.
