Tender is the Flesh written by Agustina Bazterrica, read by Joseph Balerrama
“After all, since the world began, we’ve been eating each other.”
― Agustina BazterricA, Tender Is the Flesh
Readuction:
We are what we eat, inexorably human. Slavery? Barbaric. But cannibalism? (Not that the “special meat” industry would call it that.) Government sanctioned! Necessary for survival.
Bazterrica’s Marcos Tejo’s role at the meat processing plant belies the propaganda. He puts in the butcher’s order while others are buying up Chuck. The tanner gives him the skinny on quality “products”. The game reserve and the laboratory send him hunting “heads” with their desired traits. He ensures the mass slaughter of domesticated humans is as efficient and ethical as possible. But even if they can’t scream, eventually, in this work, you break.
Boiling Points:
Author
Agustina Bazterrica
Genres
Dystopian, Allegorical, Dark
Published
Text: 2017, Scribner; Audiobook: 2020, Simon & Schuster Audio
Recommended Format
Audiobook – performed by Joseph Balerrama
Themes
freedom of choice, individuality, challenging the norm, perspective
“The craving for meat is dangerous.”
― Agustina BazterricA, Tender Is the Flesh
“There are words that cover up the world.”
― Agustina BazterricA, Tender Is the Flesh
feels:
Bazterrica brings us through the slaughterhouse doors and shines a spotlight directly in our blind eye in her 2017 novel, Tender is the Flesh. Balerrama was a fantastic choice to breathe life into Bazterrica’s characters in this 2020 Audiobook version. The actor lends Tejos authenticity, and carries across his complex world of love, loss, and obligation tinged by clinical disengagement.
Bazterrica emphasizes the importance of words, of labels, and how they shape our perception. And it’s true. We shape our reality with words. Calling a foot a “hind trotter” helps us disconnect us from the source of said “lower appendage”. We subject our rules of decency to death by a thousand cuts.
It certainly makes you (or at least me) think twice about the industrial slaughterhouse scene that sources most of our meat today. Like the domesticated humans portrayed in the novel, these creatures bred with the sole intent of consuming them have no voice to speak up for themselves. They won’t ever be free, they don’t even know they can be.
exceptional excerpts:
“His gaze is opaque, as though behind the impossibility of uttering words madness lurks.”
― Agustina BazterricA, Tender Is the Flesh
“Everyone says that he fell because he flew too close to the sun,’ his father said, ‘but he flew, do you see what I mean son? He was able to fly. It doesn’t matter if you fall, if you were a bird for even just a few seconds”
― Agustina BazterricA, Tender Is the Flesh
“I don’t get why a person’s smile is considered attractive. When someone smiles, they’re showing their skeleton.”
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