There have been other vocal non-meat eating novelists – and indeed other Nobel Prize winning ones. The 2003 winner J M Coetzee has written The Lives of Animals, a metafictional novella about animal rights, as well as numerous articles on vegetarianism. Meanwhile vegetarian and feminist Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Prize in 2018, offered up a strongly anti-carnivorous message in her 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which, in one memorable passage, featured its elderly protagonist Janina cursing the normalisation of exploiting animals: “What sort of a world is this? Someone’s body is made into shoes, into meatballs, sausages, a bedside rug, someone’s bones are boiled to make broth… Shoes, sofas, a shoulder bag made from someone’s belly, keeping warm with someone else’s fur, eating someone’s body, cutting it into bits and frying it in oil… Can it really be true? Is this nightmare really happening?”
In Tender is the Flesh, Bazterrica imagines a terrifying endpoint to our meat obsession. One of the things she is happiest about, she tells me, is that her book is being read in Argentinian schools, even outside the capital. “I think it’s really important for teenagers to start questioning the matrix,” she says. Even in steak-loving Argentina, veganism has grown in recent years – there are now more than four million vegetarians and vegans according to a 2019 study, out of a population of 44.5 million.
The novel has sold in eight languages and the critics have been generally very positive, even as they have been shaken by it. It will be interesting to see how the book will influence a new generations of readers and consumers. Tender is the Flesh is likely to have impact on readers in part because it’s a good example of fiction as “the mind’s flight simulator”. Through reading this novel, we see the full horror of a world where killing and pain are the norm. We are able to experience living in this speculative future, of our own making, where we’ve indulged our desires, but as a result are truly alone. We’ve killed off our animal companions – and we’re literally devouring each other. Marco sits in the ruins of the Buenos Aires zoo, the closest he can get to nature. There are no animals. Only memories. Sometimes we only realise how important something is when it’s too late.
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (Pushkin Press) is out now
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