Blood, guts and lesbian sex in a ruined convent? This novel was almost good

Telegraph

04-03-2025

You might think that Argentina's most brilliant literary exports today are the children of Jorge Luis Borges. Wrong: they're descended from Silvina Ocampo, the unsettling short-story writer who was Borges's near-contemporary. Look, for instance, at Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin; or Agustina Bazterrica, whose Tender is the Flesh, a novel about factory-farming humans for cannibalism, proved a hit.
Bazterrica's latest novel to reach English, thanks to translator Sarah Moses, is The Unworthy. It's set in a dystopic, post-civilisation convent. The building is a former Christian site, and its images of 'the erroneous God, the negative mother, the false son' are now smeared with black paint; yet they maintain Christianity's language and worst excesses. There are the 'Chosen' and 'Enlightened', who live in a 'Refuge', locked away beyond a 'carved black door' like Julian of Norwich. There's also the 'Tower of Silence', 'Creek of Madness' and more besides.
Our female narrator has a child's sadistic curiosity about insects and nature, and can't remember her life before she arrived at the convent as a 'wanderer', which diseased and dying people continually do. She keeps a journal which, we're meant to believe, is written in her own blood; well, aside from a few exceptional moments when she has charcoal and berries at hand. She records that in this convent, eyelids are sewn, people are sat on shards of glass. There are lashings, flagellations, tongues cut out, burnings and live burials. There are mysterious environmental illnesses too, such as a 'haze with a sticky consistency, like a spiderweb', which causes skin reactions and breathing trouble.
This is the sort of sinister material of which, in sparing amounts, the best Latin American stories are made. But like eggs, Bazterrica's terrors come by the dozen, and with oversaturation comes mundanity. There's a lot of blood, to the point that I envisioned someone backstage with a hose of it, or a sophisticated, blood-spewing sprinkler system. (Other excretions are conspicuously marginalised. Faeces are mentioned once. To consume rotting fish leads to a chest 'gone up in flames', blood that's 'lava, a scalding ocean' – not the more pedestrian diarrhoea.)
There is no relief, comic or otherwise. The story descends into an Ann Radcliffe ridiculousness that would make Jane Austen giggle, and therefore I'm afraid, the average British reader. The language, at least in translation, is clichéd and unintentionally spoofy: 'Still, like a broken stone sculpture', or 'many-headed serpent of desire'. It lacks the knowing and highly controlled puppeteering of Ocampo's or (say) Angela Carter's work.
At last, a rare cup of coffee at the convent opens up the narrator's memory, like a post-apocalyptic Proustian madeleine, to a parade of hallmark images of civilisational collapse: the eating of housecats, the burning of books, the killing of children. Old mobile phones are 'black screens and silence'. From then on the narrator remembers and tells the reader everything, and the structure shifts between the present and the past. (Essentially, the coffee is one powerful narrative laxative.)
At the convent, she starts a lesbian affair with a newcomer, Lucia, while hinting to her, and to us, that in her pre-convent life she suffered the loss of a mysterious 'Circe'. 'I don't want to write what happens next,' she writes. 'The pain, the silent fury… my clothes tattered, stained with blood, hers and mine, two bodies broken, hers and mine'. When she tells Lucia, they sob over it together. This melodrama tested my patience: how painful could it be for the narrator if she had forgotten entirely until a shot of caffeine? And in a world where they mainly eat crickets, where are the coffee beans coming from? This reader felt no emotion. I'd seen too many gouged-out eyes.