"Without faith, there is no refuge," she repeated, and rang her small bell several times. The Full Auras saw the signs in the sky. The Diaphanous Spirits heard them in the buzzing of the insects, in the slightest shift of the clouds, in the plants' growth. The Minor Saints warned us with celestial song, and the Enlightened, the emissaries of the light, declared it to be acid rain.

The House of the Sacred Sisterhood was founded by Him (who only the Chosen and the Enlightened have the privilege of seeing) and the Superior Sister (they say she fought in the water wars).

A climate catastrophe has left the outside unlivable: contaminated water, toxins carried by the wind, extreme temperatures, the thick haze that lasts for days on end. Occasionally a hare is trapped but it's often a deformed abomination. The relentless chirp of crickets betrays their main source of protein.

There are three orders of the Chosen (mutilated).

The Minor Saints have ethereal voices:

After a dramatic silence, the Minor Saints resumed their song. I saw thousands of white petals leave their mouths, filling the air, lily petals that glimmered until they disappeared. Their voices can reach the universal notes, vibrate with the light of the stars. (That's why their eyes are sewn shut, so they're not distracted by the mundane, so they capture the reverberations of our God.)

The Diaphanous Spirits have perfect pitch. Their tongues are cut out when they are chosen, so they communicate in writing to the Superior Sister. 

They can perceive the bitter, lurking sound of sickness, the slow absorption of bone tissue; they've heard the soft swell of the dark where our organs reside; they can tell by our pulse whether our heart seeks only possession or wants to redeem itself, whether it seeks to wound or to dissolve into another heartbeat; they can discern the damp movement of the bacteria that inhabit us, the microcosm we carry around without feeling it. Sometimes they spend long hours in the field trying to detect human words in the wind, messages from God. It's common to see them turning in circles, the palms of their right hands open to the sky and the left to the earth. But no one knows why they do this.

With perforated eardrums, the Full Auras can orate purely. "God's messages leave traces on their bodies"; they have the gift of prophetic vision.

The Enlightened embody all the virtues of the three orders of Chosen. They are the mediators with the ancestral, hidden God, the one before those that men created.  

The rest are unworthy. Their continuous sacrifices are necessary for God to protect their small world. It is forbidden to invoke "the erroneous God, the false son, the negative mother."

There is a lower class still, the nameless servants:

They whisper poison because their bodies carry the marks, the signs, of contamination, and though they can no longer infect us, they have to work to clean our filth and the filth that runs through their veins. They hate us because they have to serve us. The marks are the remnants of the pustules, wounds, infections. The rashes are the filth of evil, the filth of collapse, the filth of failure. This filth absorbed from the sick earth has blighted them permanently, lest we forget that corruption lurks and the Enlightened are the only ones who can quell it. This filth, nesting in the servants' skin, in their cells, is the anger of the sea, the fury of the air, the violence of the mountains, the outrage of the trees. It's the sadness of the world.

The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica, is an unsettling account of a sheltered postapocalyptic community. The unnamed, unworthy narrator secretly keeps a journal of the goings on while struggling to recall the path that brought her to this (un?)holy place.

One day, a new wanderer happens upon the Sisterhood. Her presence, her very being, seems miraculous, and she is instrumental in helping the narrator tap into her past (including a poignant, tear-inducing relationship with the enchantress Circe).

The beauty of the language masks something sinister (I'm reminded of Piranesi). The Sisterhood is built atop the destruction of the world and the violence of men. 

While Bazterrica's previous novel, Tender Is the Flesh, verged on the ridiculous, The Unworthy creeps toward the sublime.

We are our own virus

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

Tender. One who tends. Legal tender. My heart is tender (loving, affectionate, but possibly compassionate, young, impressionable, delicate, frail, weak, soft, also sensitive and fragile). My tender feelings for you. Tender is the night. An open sore is tender. Is it a physical state, or an emotional one?

When we tenderize meat, we break it down. It becomes soft and pliable. 

"Have you ever eaten something that's alive?"

"I haven't."

"There's a vibration, a subtle and fragile heat, that makes a living being particularly delicious. You're extracting life by the mouthful. It's the pleasure of knowing that because of your intent, your actions, this being has ceased to exist. It's the feeling of a complex and precious organism expiring little by little, and also becoming part of you. For always. I find this miracle fascinating. This possibility of an indissoluble union." 

Tender Is the Flesh, by Agustina Bazterrica, is about cannibalism and factory farming. Kind of. It's clearly a dystopia, although that label didn't occur to me while reading it; I was too involved with the personal drama of one man grappling to reset his moral compass to examine the societal implications. 

I bought into the premise immediately. This book was horrifically unsettling and pageturningly weird (the lovechild of Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream and Roberto Bolano's 2666).

Animals, globally, have fallen prey to a virus — many have been eradicated, those that remain are deadly. Humankind, with its taste for meat, turns to cannibalism. Rather than abolish the practice, governments regulate it, converting existing facilities and supporting economic forces to produce "special meat," sourced initially from marginalized populations and then bred in captivity.

He always asks himself what it would be like to spend most of the day storing human hearts in a box. What do the workers think about? Are they aware that what they hold in their hands was beating just moments ago? Do they care? Then he thinks about the fact that he actually spends most of his life supervising a group of people who, following his orders, slit throats, gut, and cut up women and men as if doing so were completely natural. One can get used to almost anything, except the death of a child.

Marcos remembers the times before the Transition, but the before and after of his life are marked more significantly by the tragic death of his child and the dissolution of his marriage. He is floundering in the aftermath, and it's only when he is gifted a female specimen — for his personal consumption, or resale, or potentially for breeding with the right permits — and he has to deal with its inconveniences that he appears to be roused from his moral stupor. It's not an epiphany of consciousness so much as a confrontation with logistics.

The novel's Spanish title, Cadáver exquisito, may be more evocative of the surreal and erotic elements that simmer beneath the surface.

She offers him a cigarette and lights it for him. While they smoke, she says, "I don't get why a person's smile is considered attractive. When someone smiles, they're showing their skeleton." He realizes he's never seen her smile, not even when she took hold of the hooks, raised her face, and cried out in pleasure. It was a single cry, a cry both brutal and dark. [...]

Spanel has an arrested beauty about her. It disturbs him that there's something feminine beneath the brutal aura she takes great care to give off. There's something admirable in her artificial indifference.

There's something about her he'd like to break.

Spanel is the butcher he occasionally fucks. Somehow, Marcos' relationship to her is not at all surprising amid the spectrum of women with whom he has contact — his sister, the administrator at his father's nursing home, the scientist at the lab, his estranged wife, and not least the specimen he tied up in the barn.

In fact, the argument could (should) be made that Tender Is the Flesh is a deeply feminist novel, beyond the typical feminist–vegetarian links, from how the processing farms treat pregnant specimens to how Marcos in one way or another commodifies the women in his life.

What he wants is for her to scream, for her skin to cease being a still and empty sea, for her words to crack open, dissolve. [...]

When she stops writhing, he runs his hand along her skin, and he kisses her and continues to move slowly. It's then that Spanel screams, she screams as if the world didn't exist, she screams as if words had split in two and lost all meaning, she screams as if beneath this hell there was another hell, one from which she didn't want to escape.

Specimens have their vocal cords removed. They are silenced. Euphemisms abound throughout the society so as not to utter the truth.

This novel was ousted from the 2021 Tournament of Books in the first round, but the commentariat has a lot of insight into dehumanization, sermonization, and the horror genre. Interestingly, the discussion revolved more around this book than the novel that beat it out.

Marcos is also tender, broken down by life and still naïve. How is it that what one feels can be so at odds with what is. 

One day he saw his parents dancing to the rhythm of Armstrong's trumpet. They moved in the half-light and he stood there for a long time, watching them in silence. His father stroked his mother's cheek and, still a young child, he felt that this was love. He couldn't put it into words, not at the time, but he knew it in his body, in the way one feels that something is true.