Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica (Buenos Aires, 1974) is one of today’s most prominent Latin American literary voices. Her novel Cadáver exquisito (Alfaguara, 2017)—translated to over thirty languages and the winner of such major awards as the Clarín-Alfaguara Novel Prize (Argentina, 2017) and the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award (USA, 2021)—is one of the most read and studied of recent times by both critics and the general public.
Its translation into English, published as Tender Is the Flesh (Scribner 2020; trans. Sarah Moses), was a finalist in the “Horror” category of the Goodreads Choice Awards (2020), a prize awarded to the best books of the year from one of the world’s most influential communities of readers, alongside authors such as Stephen King, as the only book on the list originally written in Spanish. Four years later, the novel has reasserted itself by earning a spot among the top hundred most read books in the world as part of the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, coming in as the fourth most popular in its genre.
With her latest book, Las indignas (Alfaguara, 2023), soon to be published in English as The Unworthy: A Novel (Scribner, 2025; trans. Sarah Moses) and already on its way to becoming another major success, I spoke with the author at a Buenos Aires café about her perspective on the political dimension of literature, the present phenomenon of Latin American women writers, and some hitherto-unmentioned keys to reading her most influential book.
Fernando Valcheff García: What do you see as being literature’s role in the construction of a political aesthetics? How do you think your creative process joins the individual dimension with the collective?
Agustina Bazterrica: I don’t know if literature can really change things, but I do believe it often offers new perspectives on the world. And I’m not interested in creating partisan, moralistic literature. I am interested, though, in the book moving people, asking them questions, making them reflect. Maybe my book can at least generate a different perspective, an understanding, a sense of empathy with the other.
There is no individual dimension, as far as I’m concerned, because as solitary as the act of writing may be, you’re never alone. You bear on your back everything you’ve ever read, all the authors you carry with you, whether consciously or not. While I’m writing, I read, reread, study other books so I can think about my own work. And, in that sense, it’s a collective thing.
My creative process implies rewriting everything I’ve read and thought, all the experiences I’ve lived through and what I’ve felt. I return to my own texts, my own reflections, and to what speaks to me, what strikes me as unjust, what bothers me about the world. Good art, or the art that interests me, is art that keeps bringing up new questions or making me feel uncomfortable. And, for me, that’s a political position. Apathy is also a choice. I choose all the time to try to go beyond, to surprise myself, to keep reading, to keep learning. And I’m interested in doing the same thing with literature.
F.V.G.: Do you see writing and literature as forms of activism? How do you think you can affect and be affected by them?
A.B.: With my friend Pamela Terlizzi Prina, who is a poet, writer, and feminist, we put on the “Siga al conejo blanco” (“follow the white rabbit”) reading series from 2015 to 2020 (with a special edition in June 2024 put on by the National Library of Argentina). All the videos are on YouTube. We invited a ton of writers—well known ones, up-and-comers, everything—to read once a month. So, on the one hand, there’s the activism of sharing your colleagues’ work, and on the other hand, it’s been so enriching for me because I started reading my peers, I’ve met incredible writers. All of that influences your way of writing and looking at the world. Because when you look at your peers you take the pulse of your era, of what’s going on.
Then there are the experiences I’ve had visiting schools. Talking to young people about human trafficking and modern-day slavery, about empathy. What matters to me is that connection to things, to literature, to readers. I never had that opportunity in high school, I never talked to a writer. So the fact that they can see me after reading my book, that they can complain to me about the ending, ask me questions, ask me for book recommendations, I think all of that helps build and illuminate this cruel matrix in which we’re living.
Plus there’s my experience in workshops. Liliana Díaz Minurry, who’s been teaching me since I was nineteen, has always been very generous. I started out in her workshop and she taught me to read with a critical perspective, to start understanding the tools with which you build a universe. Now I lead workshops, sometimes with other colleagues and sometimes alone, and teaching enriches me all the time.
F.V.G.: What is your relationship with the feminist movement and how do you think it has changed?
A.B.: Feminism has spoken to me my whole life. I think we’re all in a permanent state of construction and deconstruction, and thus I consider myself a feminist, but I also recognize that I’m constantly learning and rethinking and thinking again. It’s important to keep reading and updating yourself. There are injustices and issues that I think need a great deal of work, but that must be addressed every day if we are to keep expanding rights.
In the end, we are all victims and victimizers of the patriarchy. But I, as someone with a certain sensitivity, have to do something about it, from wherever I may be. So I’ve read about feminism and I follow feminists and I try to express that in my writing, but I never try to give marching orders.
It’s wonderful that space is opening up, but a great deal still needs to be done. Because there are still people who think it’s all a trend. For that reason alone, you have to be a feminist. You’re losing the chance to understand the perspective of the other half of the world.
F.V.G.: In recent times, critics have often turned to the metaphor of “the fall of the lettered city” to describe the current phenomenon of large-scale publishing of literary works by emerging and canonical women writers. Do you agree with that assessment? If the lettered city is being deconstructed, what is being built in its place and what’s the role of feminist struggles in new modes of thought, speech, and literary endeavor?
A.B.: They say authors used to be almost on a different plane, where, for example, they would never have gone and given a talk at a school, and that the underlying idea beneath “the lettered” was a patriarchal matter, but now, somehow, other kinds of writing are coming in from the margins—people who decide to come into contact with their readers through social media on a much more horizontal plane of relatability. I think it all comes from the same place, which is empathy: with another “woman,” another “dissidence,” another “non-human animal,” another “nature,” another “victim.” We understand we are all permeated by the matrix of capitalism, which teaches us cruelty—which teaches us, above all, to sever our bonds with the other.
What you do has an impact on the other; I think what one does, what one thinks, has an impact on the matrix. So feminism, for me, also has to do with this question of not seeing the other as a threat, of nourishing or cultivating those bonds. It has to do with an exchange of ideas, with sitting down to talk, with being under permanent construction and deconstruction, learning and rethinking. The patriarchy excludes, all the time. Feminism, on the other hand—the feminism that interests me—includes, converses, and respects. It generates something fluid.
F.V.G.: Do you think the current focus on literature written by women is helping to do away with a patriarchal logic of exceptionalism, or, inversely, might it exacerbate this logic through categories such as the “new boom”? What are the possible alternatives?
A.B.: On the one hand, what’s going on now with Latin American women writers strikes me as very positive. The fact that they are winning prizes, being translated, and having international careers is putting the subject of gender in the spotlight, leading us to read more women and raising awareness of everything that’s not being read, of libraries empty of women, of prizes with all male judges.
So, I think for many more years—hopefully not centuries—it will be important to continue raising women’s visibility. In a different sense, I would like it if someday we didn’t have to talk anymore about the writer’s gender, because it also ends up that they invite you to panels at book fairs to talk about women’s literature while men get invited to talk about issues. I want to be invited because they think my work is worth it, not to fill a quota of women. The fact is that women have been writing for centuries; we have told stories orally, in writing, with pseudonyms like Charlotte Bronte… I think, in part, feminism and all these waves of feminism are helping to raise awareness of these inequalities, and helping people want to start reading women and voices of dissent.
But calling it the “new boom” seems inaccurate. The boom was a literary happening, but more so an economic one, with four male writers under the wing of literary agent Carmen Balcells. Every one of us women writers has our own agent, we all sell differently, and we all reach readers through our own means. Obviously Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez, who represented the boom, are now classics… I mean, what they were writing is incredible. But what would have happened if they had included Clarice Lispector or Elena Garro in that group? Writers who, thanks to their own bodies of work, their literature, are now classics too?
F.V.G.: On the topic of your novel Tender Is the Flesh (2017), I thought I observed a troubling ambiguity in the construction of the women characters. What were you trying to show with the suggestive contradictions we see in them?
A.B.: I’m not interested in writing about women only as victims, because there are also victimizers among us. I’m deeply bothered by the idealization of women. That image of the loving woman, surrounded by flowers, perfect. The world is full of women who are bad people, who have all the nuances and complexities of any other human being. I tried to show that in the novel, working with the logic of capitalism: do you serve me or not, are you useful to me or not.
Doctor Valka is this admirable, alpha-female boss, but one who has taken on a lot of men’s vices. Spanel—who emerged from a portrait by Marcos López, a famous Argentine photographer—is beyond good and evil. She’s a child abuser, because she has sex with Marcos when he’s a minor, but she’s also the first woman to get up the nerve to open a butcher shop for human meat. She takes hold of that place of power and survival. Marisa is over-adapted to the world; not only does she not question anything, she also takes its paradigm to the extreme. And Jazmín represents all those silenced women, but also represents and questions the blurred border between an animal, and a person. She will always be something in between a product, a human, and a pet.
F.V.G.: Tender Is the Flesh stages the complex relationship between words and the world. What is the bond the novel builds between language, silences, and what, in previous interviews, you observed as the “neverending circle of violence” of capitalism?
A.B.: When you want to impose a new paradigm—like, in this case, eating human flesh—language is fundamental, because language creates reality.
For me, the crucial part of any work is the point of view. What you have to find as a writer, and this is one of the hardest parts, is the perfect narrator to tell the story. What came to me first was the idea that the narrator should be a head that escapes. It would have been experimental, impossible to read, and it wasn’t what I wanted to do. So I sat down to write and the voice of Marcos came out—I mean, the first paragraph of the novel, or the first page, is written just as I sat down to write it the first time. There were virtually no changes. “Media res” were the first words.
There are no synonyms in the words—each one has its own nuance, its own weight, its own sound. I think the violence is in the language, which is so dry, so narrative, so visual. If I had written the novel in much more complex language, much more baroque or poetic, it wouldn’t have generated what this generates for me: nightmares, nausea. Since it’s so easy to read, the reader is deceived. Suddenly, you start entering into these images that aren’t so pleasant to you. In the novel, I also talk about smells, I talk about textures, the environment, the characters. On the other hand, when you only talk from a somewhat abstract place, it’s very hard to get involved in the story in a bodily sense.
Then there’s the matter of staying detached as you tell the story, because I’m not judging what the characters do. The narrator is focused on Marcos, but doesn’t judge him and never names him; that’s one of the novel’s silences. And why doesn’t he name him? I don’t know if this is respected in all the translations into thirty-one languages, but in English we made sure it was respected because it gives the book its texture. The reader has no conscious idea, but still somehow feels how the narrator is not naming Marcos.
The euphemisms, the whole matter of the Transition and practically not explaining how it was—that was on purpose. For example, you never know the name of the virus. I say that, after the GGB (which is the Gran Guerra Bacteriológica, or Great Bacteriological War, for me), a virus appeared. Many readers believe the virus is real. Well, I don’t know, in the novel that’s called into question; maybe they start reading and, not having all the information, the paradigm starts to feel natural to them, this world, and they get to thinking about how they would be: if they would eat, or if they would be heads.
F.V.G.: What are the common points and differences between Las indignas (2023), your most recent novel, and Tender Is the Flesh? How has the book been received so far?
A.B.: It’s been received beautifully. In Argentina it’s on its fifth edition, it’s being translated into other languages (I’ve signed ten contracts so far), they’re reading it in tons of book clubs, people are recommending it. I’m very grateful and happy with how it’s going. Its common point with Tender Is the Flesh is the question: Why do we believe in what we believe in? Why do certain paradigms become natural to us? It’s also a novel with violence and darkness, but, unlike Tender Is the Flesh, its register is poetic; so, many readers feel pleasure as they read it. They tell me they suffer, they cry, they get excited, they feel afraid, but they also find beauty in the way it’s written. And, while both novels could be categorized as “dystopian,” I think we have to break out of classifications and literary straitjackets. What interests me is my work generating different dialogues, different questions, and expanding.
Fernando Valcheff García
University of Michigan
Conducted with support from the Tinker Foundation and the U-M Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
