Every day, upon leaving her Catholic high school, Agustina Bazterrica and her friends were followed by the same predatory man who would aim “the most terrible words” in their direction. A different man once masturbated in front of her on a packed train. “No one did anything,” she recalls. Coupled with the epidemic of violence against women in her native Argentina – where 212 femicides were reported in 2022 – these early experiences nurtured the feeling that “because you are a woman, anything can happen to you at any time”.
This sense of ever-present threat permeates the author’s new short story collection, 19 Claws and a Black Bird, translated by Sarah Moses, which serves up a smörgåsbord of assault, murder and suicide. It follows Bazterrica’s second novel, Tender Is the Flesh, set in a world where cannibalism has been legalised after a virus renders animal meat unfit for human consumption. That novel laid bare the violence in everyday experiences of womanhood through visceral, often shocking prose: for example, a female “head” (the euphemistic word for human livestock) has her vocal cords removed to prevent her from screaming.
First published in 2017, Tender Is the Flesh won the Premio Clarín de Novela award for Spanish literature. Upon its English-language release in 2020, the New York Times described it as Soylent Green meets The Wanting Seed, only “more powerful”, and it went on to become a viral sensation on TikTok, where users collectively gagged at Bazterrica’s 23-page description of a human factory farm.
Tender Is the Flesh, also translated by Moses, preempted the recent wave of cannibal-themed culture, which Bazterrica says reflects a natural obsession with taboo subjects. But – much like Mimi Cave’s film Fresh, Claire Kohda’s vampire novel Woman, Eating and the TV series Yellowjackets – the Argentine writer turns a feminist lens on flesh-eating.
“Tender Is the Flesh is a meditation on what capitalism is – it teaches us to naturalise cruelty,” she says, speaking over Zoom from the home she shares with her husband and two cats in Buenos Aires. “Capitalism is a system into which we are all born, we have it inside of us, and patriarchy is part of that system. I tried to work with this idea that we eat each other in a symbolic way. With women it’s so obvious, because you can talk about human trafficking, war and the way women are made invisible in different spheres. Here in Argentina, they kill women every day. Capitalism and cannibalism are almost the same, you know?”
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Bazterrica grew up in Buenos Aires in a family of voracious readers. As a young adult, she briefly entertained the prospect of becoming an opera singer before going on to study fine art. For 22 years, she balanced creative writing with secretarial work, publishing a novel (Matar a la Niña, or Kill the Girl) in 2013, followed by a collection of short stories in 2016, many of which are being republished as part of 19 Claws. Written over a 30-year period, an even earlier version of the collection won the Buenos Aires Municipal prize for literature, a major literary award in Argentina that provides winners with a lifetime allowance to support the pursuit of their craft. But it was only in 2021, after the English-language publication of Tender Is the Flesh, that Bazterrica quit her job to focus on writing.
In 19 Claws, Bazterrica resumes the study of the macabre that characterised Tender Is the Flesh. This time, however, the brutality of the female experience is cut through with a dark wit and a heavy dose of the fantastic. Candy Pink is a deranged self-help manual, guiding readers through the increasingly erratic stages of a break-up. In The Continuous Equality of the Circumference, a woman goes to extreme lengths in her quest to become a circle. The story highlights the absurdity of modern beauty standards while inverting the notion of thinness as aspirational.
“When I started writing the story, I didn’t have the knowledge of what we now call ‘fatphobia’, but I did live it every day of my life in Argentina, which is one of the most fatphobic countries in the world,” says Bazterrica. “Here, if you want to get clothes, there are only three sizes – small, medium and large – and even the large is really small.”
Another short story, Roberto, tackles child sexual abuse over an unsettling two pages. It gave Bazterrica her second brush with internet stardom; a reading of the text, posted by TikTok user @lulegallo, has been viewed nearly 4m times. At 49, Bazterrica says she is “too old” for the app but is grateful for the role it has played in her success. She is wary, too, of the anti-BookTok discourse that has arisen in recent months (a viral GQ article published in February said the corner of the app where people post reading recommendations was overrun with “an uncanny falseness” and “a showy nothingness that only approximates bibliophilia”).
“Every platform or social network has its contradictions. However, I believe that it has a lot to do with how one uses them and what one decides to consume,” she says. “Anything which disseminates literature is highly positive to me.”
Bazterrica recently completed a third novel, another “violent dystopia” featuring the secret diary of a woman living in a post-apocalypse world. She is planning on turning one of the stories from 19 Claws – A Light, Swift and Monstrous Sound – into a full-length novel, too. Of the collection, she says: “I want the short stories to be like claws that take the reader and scrape them a little bit. If you’re indifferent to a text, the text doesn’t work.”
• 19 Claws and a Black Bird by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses, is published by Pushkin Press. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
