Agustina Bazterrica has been on my radar for several years now; I got Cadáver exquisito (published in English translation, by Sarah Moses, as Tender Is the Flesh) out of the library a while ago and it’s been sitting with all the other library books waiting for me to be in the right mood. I finally decided, on a whim, that it was time, and it certainly lives up to its promise, both based on its blurb and based on my past experience with Argentina horror (Mariana Enríquez’s Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego and Éste es el mar and Samanta Schweblin’s Kentukis). this is to say that while it was, objectively, very good, it was also a little too much for me — more like Kentukis, which I found induced skin-crawling, than like Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego, which was intense but more manageable.
the premise of the novel is simple: following (officially) the discovery of a deadly virus that all animals can be carriers of, humans engage in a mass culling of both wild and domestic animals. out of the unrest and uncertainty that accompanies the virus panic emerges a new industry, the raising of humans as livestock to produce meat (and milk, though meat is the focus of the novel). the protagonist, Marcos Tejo, is a meat processing plant manager who has found himself increasingly disillusioned with the lies and euphemisms that conceal the violence on which his job is built. early in the novel he receives an initially unwanted “gift” from one of the breeders his plant buys from: a “female” to do with as he sees fit. Marcos, grieving the recent death of his infant son and subsequent separation from his wife, grooms and impregnates this female in search of a new son, even as his personal and professional lives are falling apart around him.
I kept coming back, as I read, to Murray Constantine’s harrowing 1937 dystopia Swastika Night. Constantine and Bazterrica are beginning from radically different speculative premises, but both are attempting to deal with an absolute othering. Bazterrica’s is more intense that Constantine’s, but Marcos’s treatment of “Jazmín” (his name for the “female”) reminded me in some ways of Alfred grappling with the idea that women might be human. like Swastika Night, Cadáver exquisito is grappling with a range of pressing political questions: the dehumanization of women, of immigrants, and of racialized groups and other minorities, here made brutally literal; climate change, as the specter of the de facto extinction of animals haunts the narrative; capitalist exploitation and violence, both in general and specifically in the form of neocolonial economic relations. it is not, I think, a coincidence that the novel begins with Marcos meeting a Japanese breeder and then a German investor; late in the novel we’re told that the price of “carne especial” (special meat) has recently fallen dramatically because India has finally legalized its production.
this points to one of the things about the novel that gave me pause, or that felt strangely dated, namely its claim — through Marcos’s perspective — that the animal virus was/is a lie and the “Transition” (Transición) to human meat was first and foremost a way to deal with the problem of “overpopulation”. the emphasis on overpopulation as a problem felt very ’70s, not necessarily in a good way. it’s not the primary focus of the novel, however, so I don’t hold it too much against it.
the narration is in some ways quite pedestrian: about half of the novel is devoted to Marcos just going about his work. what gives the novel its power is the stark contrast between the everyday tone of these sections and the gruesome horror of what Marcos’s work entails. we might describe the novel as “pulling no punches”; we might also describe it as “heavy-handed”, depending on our taste. the other comparison I was thinking about was Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest; Cadáver exquisito is similarly openly polemic, and I think, like Le Guin, that it earns this.
it is a deeply unsettling read, the more so because it is so focused on the hypocrisy of Marcos’s disgust at the “special meat” industry and the cannibalistic culture that surrounds it and his active complicity in it as both a beneficiary of it (with a house and an apparently comfortable income) and an active perpetrator of that violence, though he’s now moved into a managerial role. particularly striking is the sequence where he gives two job applicants a tour of the facility: one of them is troubled by the violence he perceives; the other obviously revels in it. Marcos favors the first candidate, and on one level this is “obviously” “correct” — until you remember that accepting either applicant as “better” means accepting the inevitability of the mass slaughter of human beings.
this is a book to be read in the imperial core.
(the other thing I was less than thrilled with is the dream sequences. this is mainly a matter of personal taste, I think, but I would say about 90% of dreams in books — particularly Significant Dreams in speculative fiction — simply do not feel like dreams to me. there are a few dreams throughout this, but relative to the bulk of the novel it was just a mild annoyance.)
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