Great book so far. A virus makes animals fatal to eat, so of course there could only be 1 solution, systematically breeding and eating people. I know it’s another reality/universe but the main character remembers eating animals as a child. That means people went from normal to completely evil in 1 generation. By the time the man is grown, he lives in a world where everyone acts like a psychopath, trying to normalize it. It’s like in one person’s lifetime, everyone lost their souls to the point where empathy was practically illegal. If the world in this writer’s mind changed that fast, I wonder what a sequel 100 years into the future would look like…
This post contains minor spoilers, but if you’re having trouble with the contrivance of the book, I think this will help.
Tender is the Flesh is not first and foremost genre literature about a future where we eat people and exploring that space; it is an allegory for how under Capitalism we treat people as commodities.
Now to the spoilerey bits:
You find out over the course of the book that the virus is just made up. The ruling powers did so in order to justify the mass imprisonment and slaughter of immigrants and the poor.
If you think “there’s no way people could become comfortable with this level of oppression in a single generation”, the book leads us to realize that we already live in a world where much of the horror of the book is currently happening and yet the vast majority of people go on with the lives anyways.
I would think the obvious solution would be veganism, but who am i…
I mean the book surely has some response to this, otherwise it would be unreadable for me…
Metaphors must be rough. Start out with the prequel “a Modest Proposal” by Johnathan Swift and maybe it will fill out some of the lore.
Meat industry lobbied for it.
There is a lot of very unrealistic stuff in the book. People surviving procedures and operations nobody could survive, everyone accepting humans as food WAY too fast, ect.
Meat industry lobbied for it.
Idk why they don’t just start eating impossible burgers.
Such a good book. You might not have made it that far, but its more or less stated that what really happened was
- The virus comes out
- Meat industry and meat lobby still exists
- Lobbies to make human meat legal to eat
- Spreads a bunch of stories about people eating each other due to lack of meat
- Corrupt politicians give in to the lobby
But its not really important. Its background noise to the story. The story is about the dude and about the society and about how we view women and animals and each other. Its a book that could not have been written by a man.
This book was weird and I loved it
I read this a while back. I like disturbing and dystopian books. This didn’t disappoint. I think I’m scarred for life.
Also, the ending…
Considering that the US is about 30 days away from the hunger games, this sounds more like a prophecy than a fiction book.
I just noticed you posted this comment exactly 30 days before the new movie is released…Was that intentional?
I had no idea there was even a new one coming out—I’m not really a fan of the series. I meant it more in the metaphorical way—that the US is 30 days away from forcing the poor to kill each other for the entertainment of the billlionaires.
We all know it wouldn’t be called the hunger games though. It would probably be called The Big Beautiful America 250 Make Combat Great Oh Say Can You See Third Term Trump UFC Red White Blue And Gold Extravaganza.
They are starting to legalize putting homeless people in labor camps. I don’t think things could possibly be worse. I realize that obviously they could but the path that we are on couldn’t be more reprehensibly disgusting.
The newest Hunger Games was also good.
