Editor’s Note: This is one of the three finalist reviews of LALT’s first-ever book review contest, held in 2023. We are pleased to share the selected reviews in this issue of the journal.
Buenos Aires, Argentina: Penguin Random House. 2023. 192 pages.
In Las indignas, the third novel by Agustina Bazterrica, the Argentine writer shows us a post-apocalyptic world devastated by a series of natural disasters, each more violent than the last, as might well come to pass in a not-so-distant future. Here, a hermetic, vertical society of women survives, locked away in an ancient monastery under the strict command of a Sister Superior: a desperate measure, perhaps, to survive the adverse conditions of life outside. This female society is headed by a holy man whose face is never seen, always known simply as “Him,” whom all the women serve. All of this is narrated by a survivor who, in hiding and with flimsy writing tools (paper and ink left behind by monks in years gone by, or fashioned out of plant matter) reveals, in tremulous and hesitant fashion, the characters, rites, hierarchies, and other actions that take place within the walls, in this dystopian, carceral convent. In part as warning and in part as testimony, the narrator tells us of the desperation and psychosis brought about by her cloistering in an end-times setting where not a trace of civilization remains: a sort of Penelope, weaving and waiting for something to happen.
The reader in search of an entertaining story about apocalyptic worlds will find in Las indignas the same clichés of other, similar tales tinged with science fiction. We have the dictatorial, patriarchal, and conventual world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, to which it owes its greatest debt; the polluted, smoldering, gray world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as its most immediate literary reference to environmental devastation; as well as echoes of television series like The Walking Dead and video games like The Last of Us. These tales of graphic eschatology, describing the end of an era, a way of life, or an entire global society, do not spring up out of nowhere; rather, they are products of collective anxieties. It is no coincidence that many of such stories appeared, whether as novels or films, close to the year 2000. That same year, a geological hypothesis—the Anthropocene—started to gain steam among environmentalists and climate activists, justifiably concerned about increasing environmental degradation and the high levels of greenhouse gasses that have already produced deadly floods, droughts, and other meteorological phenomena.
In Las indignas, Agustina Bazterrica collates many of the environmental anxieties of our time; however, the book’s greatest virtue is not its description of this post-apocalyptic world, which serves less as context and more as pretext to keep a group of women locked up, oppressed by a male authority. The most striking part of this novel lies, conversely, in its narrator’s account—the only way we discover the full story—and in how she tells it. Nonetheless, the device of the found manuscript is already quite familiar, with a long tradition in Spanish-language literature (in this regard, one need only pick up No voy a pedirle a nadie que me crea by Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos). Even this book’s particularities are somewhat insipid, such as, for example, the crossings-out, presented typographically as follows: “The chosen ones (the mutilated ones)”; or the sentences that trail off without grammatically correct periods, to indicate that the narrator’s manuscript is unfolding as a “work in progress,” progressing, pausing, and being interrupted in time with the story itself. The crossings-out reveal the narrator’s vacillations as she writes. Readers might perceive the lack of periods in certain paragraphs and the crossings-out as errors, but their expressive novelty runs out as soon as this device is explained in the narrator’s own voice. Sadly, the novel does not give the reader the chance to ponder or question what has been published—after all, the crossed-out words can still be read.
“Despite the dangers to which the narrator is exposed in the convent, we get the impression that she moves through the cloisters with relative ease”
Since this manuscript is a forbidden text, as is to be expected under the repressive and religious double-headed rule of the Sister Superior and Him, the story itself and the need to tell it become the narrator’s only leitmotif; she has this in common with other narrators who are at the brink of death or languishing in confinement. Such is the case of Pascal Duarte, the eponymous protagonist of Camilo José Cela’s novel, or self-confessed murderer Juan Pablo Castel in Ernesto Sabato’s The Tunnel. The story of Las indignas lacks any greater conflict. Despite the dangers to which the narrator is exposed in the convent, we get the impression that she moves through the cloisters with relative ease. She is even able to leave for the “forest” (one of the crossed-out words), and to revel in the brutalities committed by the Sister Superior against the nuns, and by certain nuns against others. The novel starts to get interesting, just when everything seemed at a standstill, with the appearance of Lucía, the object of the narrator’s sexual and romantic interest. The subsequent loss of Lucía spurs on the protagonist to defeat Him and his accomplice, the Sister Superior, in a climax that could just as well have come much earlier, and could be summed up with the classic trope of the knight who frees the princess from the dragon’s clutches. The characters’ lack of psychology also creates a narrative emptiness; none of them is fully rounded, with the exception of Lucía and the Sister Superior, whom we might imagine as a Latin American version of Agatha Trunchbull, the fearsome yet endearing creation of Roald Dahl. The other characters are mere names with no real depth: María de las Soledades, Lourdes, Catalina, and Élida could be anyone; they have no characteristic traits besides the actions that a select few of them undertake.
Given all the above, it might seem that this novel speaks only of a future crushed under the hooves of the four horsemen of climate change. But we would do well to remember that every dystopian novel is, in truth, an allegory for the present and, above all, a moral allegory, not necessarily with any cautionary aim. With Las indignas, Agustina Bazterrica offers readers an allegory more moralizing than it is moral for our society and its relationship with nature, which it preys upon mercilessly. Nevertheless, the book’s narrative resources are insufficient to jump the hurdle of good intentions. We find, instead, a mere eye-catching pretext to speak about something else besides the climate: women and the misogynistic, chauvinistic society in which they live. For this purpose, perhaps neither dystopia nor the added climatic concerns were so necessary.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
