The Unworthy - Agustina Bazterrica (DNF)
I received a review copy of this novel via NetGalley.
I'll admit that I am yet to read Tender Is The Flesh, but it's received such overwhelmingly positive reviews that I was very excited to get a copy of Bazterrica's upcoming novel The Unworthy. Unfortunately this book really didn't work for me, and despite trying to push through due to it being relatively short (plus the fact that it was a review copy) I've ultimately given up at the 50% mark.
The Unworthy drops us into a dystopian post-apocalyptic world, where we're shown life in a strange convent of sorts, populated by mutilated Saints and howling monks. The narrator keeps a diary of her life, written in the dark when nobody knows she is writing, kept hidden beneath her bed lest the Sisters find it.
I desperately wanted to love this, but the writing is so impenetrable as to be almost meaningless. Bazterrica gives absolutely nothing away about who these people are or why they live the way they do, and nothing that we're shown has any rhyme or reason. And what we are shown is miserable, an endless torrent of torture and mutilation witnessed and partaken in gleefully by the narrator, who seems to hate everyone around her and takes great joy in seeing suffering (while acknowledging that she doesn't want to be mutilated herself).
If there's a point here I failed to find it in the nearly 100 pages that I read, and the initial visceral shock of the torture scenes eventually wore of due to oversaturation so that I was simply bored of reading about it. Other reviews imply that it all comes together in the end, but I simply didn't have the endurance to get there.