A review by readingthestars
Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

4.0

“The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus.”

I'm surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. I don't typically read disturbing stories, and this was my first, so I was a bit worried. But there was a lot more to this book than just its gruesome scenes, and there was a lot of societal and political commentary to grapple with. It's a compelling novel for sure, and at only ~200 pages, it's easy to finish quickly.

I think what I like most about this book is how much I'm going to be thinking about it for the next couple of weeks. Every character is multifaceted and is difficult to explain in just one sentence, and there's a lot to explore there.

Spoiler

This whole time, we think that Marcos is actually caring for Jasmine for once, tending to her, when in reality, he was just using her and was not afraid to slaughter her once she had finished serving his purpose. He never saw her as anything more than an animal.

Marcos acts as if he's moral or better than those around him, but he's not. He's yet another product of this new society.

Society is also something that confuses me in this novel, because in a way, I can see how a world would end up like this. Like with Covid, this virus has its deniers. People become more selfish and greedy. I kept on wondering "why couldn't everyone just become vegans?" But that would never go well in our real world, because people don't just want veggies, and they don't want to be told what they can and can't eat. In that way, this became a world that I could buy into, and the writing made it easy to understand this twisted world too.

In the first chapter, I worried that the writing would be too distant and the sentences too short. That's a style that sort of bugs me if it's not used properly. I liked it in Stephen King's The Long Walk because the distant writing makes the reader understand how horrific the actions in the book are, and how normalized they are in the novel's world. And that's how I viewed the writing style in this book as well - if this were any other kind of story, I don't think it would have worked, but this is a harsh and brutal book, and the style served it well.

Again, I'm surprised! I have my limits when it comes to disgusting descriptions, but this book was honestly fine (as long as I don't think too hard about it).