Latest news with #Bazterrica
New York Times
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Inside a Sadistic Sisterhood at the End of the World
Writers have long been preoccupied with the end of the world, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the true preoccupation is with whatever new, tenuous social order struggles up from the rubble. What would starting over look like? And are human beings doomed to create dystopian conditions wherever they go? In the Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica's brilliant, chilling new novel, 'The Unworthy,' the young, unnamed narrator enters a religious order called the House of the Sacred Sisterhood after spending an unspecified amount of time wandering a landscape ravaged by climate catastrophe. Is this place, overseen by the Superior Sister and an unseen, all-powerful He, a refuge or a nightmare? And what exactly happens when a member of the unworthy class is elevated to the rank of the Chosen? These are among the questions that propel this slim, suspenseful novel. Amid global hunger and drought the Sacred Sisterhood has managed to cultivate a steady food supply — even if it involves eating a lot of crickets — and drinkable water. But danger abounds. The hierarchy is at once enigmatic and brutally enforced. Sacrifices are demanded. The punishments for infractions, administered by the sadistic Superior Sister, include whipping, disfigurement and being buried or burned alive. The mind-bending violence crushes any possibility of fellowship between the women who have found their way to this place (in the opening chapter, the narrator recounts dropping cockroaches into the pillowcase of another sister and then sewing up the slip). The unworthy are quick to turn on one another, claws out and teeth bared, in the name of survival. The horror is made visceral by Bazterrica's feverish, mythic prose, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses: 'There's something sick in the wind, a warm stupor of venom and insects. A curse creeping out of the devastated lands. We can feel the vibration of something destructive coming into being. … Something was throbbing in the air, silent and bestial.' Some sentences break off midstream; others contain words crossed out. We witness the narrator's struggle to wrest the unspeakable into language. The act of writing sustains her. She writes in the blue ink left behind by the monks who once tended this land; she writes with charcoal made from plants; she writes with her own blood. The writing is a mortal risk: She must hide these pages meticulously, so they're not discovered by the Superior Sister. She creates a record of both her cloistered, terrorized life with the Sacred Sisterhood and the world she knew before. The memories of her mother and of Circe, her companion after the apocalypse, are especially vivid and anguishing. Like Lauren Oya Olamina in Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower,' this dystopian narrator feels compelled to make a record of the end times; for both women, to write is to preserve a drop of agency, of humanity, in a blasted world, where survival often demands a willingness to commit unfathomable violations. 'Without mercy you survive,' Bazterrica's narrator says. To write is to process the new reality that is taking shape, the new story that is unfolding, and that will no longer die with her. 'Why put myself in danger with this book of the night?' the narrator writes. 'Because if I write it, then it was real.' The scrap of humanity the narrator has preserved through the act of writing is awakened when a mysterious stranger, Lucía, appears inside the walls of the Sacred Sisterhood. She seems to be a wanderer, as the narrator once was, and is taken in. Before long, Lucía displays otherworldly powers and, perhaps even more shockingly, a sense of compassion. 'The Unworthy' is a novel filled with secrets, and part of the thrill is cracking open one forbidden door at a time. Given that it's populated almost entirely by women, it's striking that patriarchal violence is at the center of the Sacred Sisterhood's rotten core. Solidarity between the unworthy, then, becomes a way to fight back. A secret bond forms between Lucía and the narrator, one that reminds them both that communion with others will always generate more strength than remaining crouched in suspicious solitude. These glimmers of hopeful connection are, of course, radically fragile — at any moment the two could be discovered and killed — but they are nevertheless critical to the narrator's emotional opening. In the novel's final moments, she remembers what survival is really for.
Telegraph
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Blood, guts and lesbian sex in a ruined convent? This novel was almost good
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.
