6/23/2023 0 Comments My day be so fine then boom![]() Written over a 30-year period, an even earlier version of the collection won the Buenos Aires Municipal prize for literature, a major literary award in Argentina that provides winners with a lifetime allowance to support the pursuit of their craft. For 22 years, she balanced creative writing with secretarial work, publishing a novel (Matar a la Niña, or Kill the Girl) in 2013, followed by a collection of short stories in 2016, many of which are being republished as part of 19 Claws. As a young adult, she briefly entertained the prospect of becoming an opera singer before going on to study fine art. Capitalism and cannibalism are almost the same, you know?”ī azterrica grew up in Buenos Aires in a family of voracious readers. Here in Argentina, they kill women every day. With women it’s so obvious, because you can talk about human trafficking, war and the way women are made invisible in different spheres. I tried to work with this idea that we eat each other in a symbolic way. “Capitalism is a system into which we are all born, we have it inside of us, and patriarchy is part of that system. “Tender Is the Flesh is a meditation on what capitalism is – it teaches us to naturalise cruelty,” she says, speaking over Zoom from the home she shares with her husband and two cats in Buenos Aires. But – much like Mimi Cave’s film Fresh, Claire Kohda’s vampire novel Woman, Eating and the TV series Yellowjackets – the Argentine writer turns a feminist lens on flesh-eating. Tender Is the Flesh, also translated by Moses, preempted the recent wave of cannibal-themed culture, which Bazterrica says reflects a natural obsession with taboo subjects. Upon its English-language release in 2020, the New York Times described it as Soylent Green meets The Wanting Seed, only “more powerful”, and it went on to become a viral sensation on TikTok, where users collectively gagged at Bazterrica’s 23-page description of a human factory farm. ![]() ![]() That novel laid bare the violence in everyday experiences of womanhood through visceral, often shocking prose: for example, a female “head” (the euphemistic word for human livestock) has her vocal cords removed to prevent her from screaming.įirst published in 2017, Tender Is the Flesh won the Premio Clarín de Novela award for Spanish literature. It follows Bazterrica’s second novel, Tender Is the Flesh, set in a world where cannibalism has been legalised after a virus renders animal meat unfit for human consumption. This sense of ever-present threat permeates the author’s new short story collection, 19 Claws and a Black Bird, translated by Sarah Moses, which serves up a smörgåsbord of assault, murder and suicide.
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