Tender Is The Flesh- A Review
Tender is the Flesh is a dystopian “horror” by Agustina Bazterrica, published in Spanish in 2017 and translated into English by Sarah Moses in 2020. This novel took me around 2 years to actually read all the way through. I read maybe the first chapter or two when I first bought it 2 years ago, and it’s made it’s way around the various surfaces of my home without being opened again until a couple of weeks ago. It’s a fairly small novel, and so it has been carried around in multiple bags as well as laid patiently on my desk, side table, dining table, bookshelf, couch, and bed. And never once could I find it in me to open it and finish the damn book.
When I stopped reading it after one chapter originally, I’m not sure if I knew why. I kept thinking “it’s supposed to be good, it’s up my alley, I’m avoiding it for no reason”. And then I picked it up. I recently read the rest of Tender is the Flesh, and I can now confidently say that It was an unnecessary read and I could have saved myself the trouble.
The book follows Marcos, a man that works as a higher-up in a human processing plant, overseeing the breeding, slaughtering, and processing of human bodies to be sold as “special meat”. This is the new reality of meat-eating in a world where the government has announced an infectious and deadly disease caused and carried by all animals. Without much explanation other than the mention of a disease as well as a general divide among those that believe in the disease and those that think it is a government ploy, we are introduced to this world and Marcos’ involvement in it.
Marcos is a quiet, stoic man made so by grief. His son has died, his wife left him to deal with it, his relationship with his sister is strained taut, and his father is in a mental hospital. Marcos is alone, going through the motions of each day only to return to an empty home. He questions the reality of the disease and the reasoning behind the legalization of cannibalism. But never very astutely.
One of my issues with Marcos is his vague, implied complexity that is never truly explored. He has conscious suspicious thoughts and questions the state of the world, and yet he never follows through. He watches vague questions pass him by and pushes through them, all to continue going through the motions of breeding, slaughtering and selling human meat. He stays stagnant, and yes, he does make a small stand by not eating meat after animals have been wiped out, but he never defends it to people like his sister, who judge him for it. He never actually questions those around him or opens a discussion. He simply mumbles remarks in his mind and goes about his day. Marcos is, unfortunately, incredibly unmotivated and conflict-avoidant, which makes him boring as a character.
His appreciation for animals and his disbelief in the truth of the disease are prominent traits of his character, and yet nothing truly comes from them. He defiantly eats vegetarian, he does not use umbrellas to shied from bird poop, and he refuses to aid his sister in her attempts to buy “domestic head” (a human bred for consumption) for her home. He is an outcast in most of his settings, and even where he is semi welcomed or appreciated it is in odd and non-conforming ways. His relationship with the female butcher, for instance; Spanel and Marcos have a strange, mostly silent relationship based on the foundation of their attraction to one another and the stoic ways they both go about dealing with their reality. They seldom speak, and most of the interactions involving her are purely just oddly grotesque sex scenes.
However, Marcos is respected at work. His coworkers and employees seem to be fond of him or at least appreciative of his work and presence. The front desk secretary, Mari, speaks to him fondly and is as close to a friend that Marcos seems to have throughout the book. The woman who cares for his mentally unwell father also treats Marcos with tenderness (ha) and caring. Cecilia, his wife, only ever appears via phone calls. She checks in on him from time to time, and they silently share the grief of losing their son as they understand that the two of them will never be the same. And that’s pretty much all we get from her until the end.
When the book really starts to pick up is the day Marcos receives a gift from his boss. He is gifted an “FGP” (first generation pure) female head. FGP head are special, purebred with the best qualities and quite valuable. Marcos has never expressed interest in such a thing, and quite adversely feels upset and stressed about the gift. His boss tells him to do with her whatever he wants. Whether this implies domesticating her, slaughtering her, or “enjoying her” (the phrase that replaces rape in this book), this is unclear. Marcos is appalled and at a loss for his next steps. He locks the female in his barn, treating her much like the innocent, wild animal that he has been so ardently defending to himself.
Marcos is a pensive character, always mulling over the state of the world and his role in it. With a female head locked away on his property and no solid plan, Marcos is stressed. And when Marcos feels pensive and stressed, he often visits the abandoned zoo that his father used to take him to, passing by empty cages and reminiscing.
So, after a particularly tense lunch with his sister, Marcos can’t bear to go home to the female in his barn. He finds himself at the abandoned zoo yet again. As he walks through the empty enclosures, he is caught in a vortex of grief. He misses his wife, their late son, his dogs, his old life. As he wallows and walks through the zoo, Marcos is surprised to come across wild puppies whining and huddling in one of the abandoned enclosures. He does not believe in the disease; he is never afraid, even with the supposed threat of disease. Where most would run or kill the dogs, he sits and plays with them, naming them and enjoying the moment of normalcy and joy.
He sits with them, gaining their trust and playing with them regardless of any possible consequences. He fondly remembers his dogs, the pets he had before the disease. It is clear Marcos misses them, and he misses the life that is now in the past.
After his encounter with the dogs, he arrives home to the female chained in his barn. He decides to clean her up, and I don’t think it is coincidence that as soon as Marcos had a moment to bond with wild animals and see them as easy, forced company, he headed home and decided to treat the human with more care. Marcos realized at the zoo that he had something to gain from an animal’s companionship. Once he remembers all he had to gain from just the company of an animal, he decides he can no longer live without it. And all he sees in his barn is an animal bred for slaughter, and in himself a lonely savior.
I think this book tries very hard to subtly hint at such things, like the effect that loneliness can have on a person and the way we treat others, or maybe something about government involvement, but these topics are buried beneath filler and gore and something that is supposed to be grief but feels instead like a smoky film over the entire novel, muddying the points and concealing true character.
So when he arrives back home from his encounter, there is the female “head”, dirty and uncomfortable in his barn. The shift in Marcos is subtle, and while usually I would appreciate a subtle decline in a character, this one just feels sudden and vague. He decides to clean the girl up, (all the while thinking of her as “the female”) and as he stands with her in the rain he notes that she smells of jasmine. He describes her appearance, studying her face, but his descriptions don’t seem personified. He describes her green eyes and pale skin, and he counts twenty branding scars across her body to identify her time in the plant. Marcos then, seemingly in an act of tenderness, kisses the branding mark on her forehead “because he knows she suffered when they did it to her,” (Pg. 118). At first when I read this I thought he was beginning to care for her and see her as an equal. I thought he would begin to attempt a relationship with her. But he goes on to stroke her neck; the place she would be cut to be slaughtered in the plant. He notes her trembling. And then, he removes his pants. His next actions and thoughts are narrated: “What he wants to do is prohibited. But he does it anyway” (Pg. 119).
And that sentence alone is enough to twist my stomach. In that moment we realize that Marcos does not see her as equal. He still sees her as an inhuman; as a poor, traumatized animal that has fallen into his care. And at the same time, the grief over his son and his past has been building. The time he spent with the dogs at the zoo sent him to his past, and he is no longer able to fight it. His grief and yearning for a second chance consume him, and he succumbs to it. The female never had a chance to be considered a woman. She was always just meat. Until suddenly, to Marcos, she was a womb.
So Marcos rapes, or “enjoys” the girl, impregnating her. His actions are illegal, and he lives now in secrecy with the female who he has dubbed “Jasmine”. Some could argue that he gave her a name, humanizing her more. I would contest that he named her after the first thing he enjoyed from her. He named her after her musk, that he smelled once he was close enough to touch her, which he did because he owned her. He named her Jasmine because the scent aroused him. I would argue the act of naming her and what he did name her is a dehumanizing moment instead of giving her a personhood.
And after that I honestly didn’t care about the story. In the end, his estranged wife helps Jasmine to deliver Marcos baby, and after Jasmine produces his child, he slaughters her. He kills her when she is no longer of use. To which his wife, horrified, says, “She could have given us more children,” (Pg.209).
Even his wife only thought of her own loss in that moment. And Marcos’ reply ends the book, his cryptic words landing dull on the page.
“She had the human look of a domesticated animal”(Pg. 209).
What I take from this line is that Marcos feels that Jasmine has become too domesticated. He fears there would be issues keeping her long enough to have more children with her. And she was a means to an end. He replaced his son, and that was all he ever wanted. All he wanted was to return to the way things were. Once he was no longer wanting, he had no use for Jasmine. He was ready to start his life over again with his wife, and his baby born of rape.
His character is truly what I find the most abhorrent part of this book. His thoughts are repetitive and the main concept of his ideas and beliefs are muddy. The sudden change from Marcos trying to go through the daily motions and ignore what was happening because he was fighting his grief, to then snapping and using the female for his own gain felt unmotivated and shock-seeking.
I found the end honestly disgusting, and while I do have a love for disgusting books, I was not impressed with the path to destruction either. It felt vague, rushed at times, and altogether it fell flat for me. I think there are a lot of topics that Tender is the Flesh tried to and could have touched on, and the whispers of it are there. But the end result is a story that feels aimless and scenes that feel as though they exist purely for shock value.
Sorry to allthe horror girlies that have recommended and/or loved this book, obviously to each their own!! It just didnt resonate with me the way I had hoped. Buuuut… I was feeling unsatisfied and I still needed my cannabilistic fix, so I just picked up A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers, and I have high hopes for this one!! Stay tuned! ;)
