These Words Contain My Pulse

Cory Oldweiler reviews Argentine author Agustina Bazterrica’s terrifying dystopian novel “The Unworthy,” translated by Sarah Moses.

By Cory OldweilerMarch 6, 2025

• Fiction

• SF

ANGLOPHONE READERS FIRST had the opportunity to sample Argentine author Agustina Bazterrica in the initial months of the pandemic, with the English-language publication of her delightfully disturbing 2017 novel Tender Is the Flesh, which conjures a world where a (different) deadly virus leads to the eradication of all animal life. Translated by Sarah Moses, who has superbly handled all three of Bazterrica’s English-language titles to date, Tender Is the Flesh centers on a slaughterhouse operator whose business processes not cattle or pigs but human beings raised as meat. While the detail with which Bazterrica considers this creepy conceit is thoroughly engrossing—and often truly gross—the novel distinguishes itself by examining the brutal choices and compromises made by those who find themselves in a system that spun out of “chaos […] when at a chilling speed the world was put back together and cannibalism was legitimized.”

Bazterrica’s next translated offering was the 2023 story collection Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (published in Spanish in 2020), which focuses more on what one character pegs as “the traces of monstrosity in everyday life. The things that we look at but don’t see, whose true essences are unknown to us.” Many of these moments concern thwarted desires for community or love, and often feature the actions of men attempting to control or demean women, starting in the first story with a death by suicide that forces a young woman out of her “ordered happiness” and shatters her “little life of comfort, wise choices, and adequate truths.” Appearing just as aggressive, regressive men (and a few women) were wedging culture wars back into US news and politics ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Bazterrica’s stories highlighted unsettling truths for those willing to see them, and seemed to presage some sort of larger and, perhaps, deserved crisis.

In her latest novel, the collapse has unquestionably arrived, and at a moment when many Americans—and others around the world—are feeling that fundamental facets of their society are precariously close to breaking down (or being broken down) for good. The Unworthy, which was published in Argentina in 2023 as Las indignas, turns an astute if despairing eye to a not-so-distant global future where small numbers of depraved elites force the desperate masses to make unimaginable compromises to secure fundamental needs such as food, shelter, and companionship. The world of the novel has been upended by a cascading series of disasters triggered by an overzealous embrace of technology and amplified by a willful disregard for the escalating effects of climate change, both of which have become veritable raisons d’être for the new US administration. Intentional steps taken to counteract the former, including electricity cuts to stop the spread of artificial intelligence (which, honestly, let’s talk about it), prove to be too little, too late: “[A]fter the final blackout the world did not recover, rebuild, restart, because nature finished things off with a new degree of devastation.” Earth’s population is annihilated, and the small number of survivors are scattered.

All of this destruction is only hinted at in flashbacks. By the time story begins, the rural areas are anarchic environments where shelter and safety are at a premium, factors that presumably inspired the opportunistic founders of the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, whose motto is “without faith, there is no refuge.” Exhausted by her wandering, the novel’s unnamed narrator became an acolyte of this purported religion “long ago,” and like all of its laity, she submits to its demands of extreme physical sacrifice—“flagellations, cuts, lashings,” and much worse—which are ostensibly needed to stave off whatever new climate emergency arises, be it wildfire, acid rain, or some more amorphous terror. Readers will quickly see the Sacred Sisterhood for what it really is, however—a cult that exists for no other purpose than the horrifying gratification of its founders via the subjugation, manipulation, and abuse of young women.

The narrator is devout, chanting along and prostrating herself reverently when required, but relatively clear-eyed about the depravity lurking behind much of the Sisterhood’s pious symbolism. Her past ordeals and present needs keep her, at least initially, from challenging the status quo, but not from questioning it in her writing. She writes the novel in real time, in stolen moments, often by candlelight, hidden beneath her bedsheet. When she isn’t writing, she has to hide the pages—under floorboards, in the garden, strapped to her skin, “close to [her] heart.” Sometimes she uses ink left by the monks whose monastery the Sacred Sisterhood occupies; sometimes she uses her blood. “These words contain my pulse. My breath.”

As with Tender Is the Flesh, Bazterrica’s world-building is perversely and unsettlingly entrancing. The Sacred Sisterhood is run by the duo of He and the Superior Sister, who maintain control through physical and mental abuse. The one known as He is never seen, only heard, and then only during ceremonies where, Oz-like, he pontificates from behind a screen or panel. He doesn’t say much, beyond hurling invective at the young women known as “the unworthy,” attempting to break them down by adding a few religious-sounding words to his litany of their supposed imperfections: “You are she-wolves engendering poison, a battalion inseminated by perdition and atrocity, a sack of fetid putrefaction, a seedbed of disgraceful lucubrators.”

He’s counterpart, the Superior Sister—his actual sister, according to some whispers—is the enforcer, a “horrific beauty” stalking the monastery halls in black, military-issue war boots and pants, with a whip hanging from her belt. Anyone who displeases the Superior Sister is “made to scream.” She “spends hours choosing branches to hit [the women] with.” She pits the unworthy against each other, rewarding them for conjuring up “exemplary punishments.” She sneaks into their rooms at night and often stays until morning. In extreme cases, she sentences transgressors to isolation at the open-air top of the Tower of Silence, or simply burns them alive or beats them to death, all in the name of devoutness.

New arrivals to the walled grounds are only admitted if they are young women—no men, children, or elderly. Those who are accepted must do a stint in the Cloister of Purification, which sits near the noisy cricket farms; this leads initiates to think they’re losing their minds, something that can actually happen if one drinks from the contaminated Creek of Madness. If a woman’s body is free from disfigurement or other signs of disease, she becomes one of the unworthy, like the narrator. “[W]e haven’t aged prematurely like the servants and have no blotches on our bodies; we have all our hair and teeth, no lumps on our arms, no black sores on our skin.” Each of the unworthy is theoretically a candidate to rise higher in the ranks, becoming Chosen or Enlightened. These tiers have their purported advantages, like access to vegetables and fruit instead of an entirely cricket-based diet, but the narrator sees through the spiritual hype. The three castes of the Chosen, for instance, are all mutilated in different ways to become literal representations of the proverbial “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” The novel opens with a harrowing scene in which one of the Chosen’s Minor Saints is bleeding from her poorly sutured eyes. The Enlightened, “the Sacred Sisterhood’s most valued treasure,” live with He in the Refuge of the Enlightened, which lies behind an ornately carved black door. Whenever the narrator braves an approach to the door and puts her ear to it, she hears muffled screams, groans, and growls that make clear what’s going on.

The petty cliques and struggle for survival among the unworthy make for an arresting story on their own, but the novel is truly animated by the narrator’s attempts to regain her memories, a journey that is aided by the arrival of a new, strikingly beautiful young wanderer who takes the name Lucía once she is accepted into the Sisterhood. The narrator is immediately drawn to Lucía, who “smells of sweat and dirt, but strongest is the scent of something sweet and fierce, like the blue of a limpid sky, a blue like a precious stone.” The attraction is reciprocated, and soon Lucía has reactivated aspects of the narrator’s personality that had lain dormant for years, making her “feel things [she’d] forgotten, like mercy.” This reinvigoration slowly helps the narrator remember where she came from, starting with memories of her mother, “whose luminous presence found beauty in the world that was degrading minute by minute.” While these recollections eventually turn incredibly dark, there are interludes of genuine light, especially a brief period the narrator spends with a found family calling themselves “tarantula kids.”

Translator Sarah Moses’s sympathetic and fiery translation brilliantly captures the narrator’s ongoing crisis of faith, with parenthetical asides that reveal her thoughtfulness and crossed-out words or phrases that demonstrate her misgivings—or, in the case of the word “woods,” hide a more overpowering terror. The narrator is intensely passionate, though early on, her only preoccupation is dreaming up schemes to torture her nemesis Lourdes, such as sewing cockroaches into her pillow. The arrival of Lucía provides a more constructive outlet for these emotions but also opens the narrator up to unfamiliar fears as the new woman’s devotion soon attracts the attention and adoration of other members of the Sisterhood, including the Superior Sister herself.

The Unworthy raises probing questions about the nature of faith and the power of abusers, and it absolutely skewers the means that organized religions employ to exert control over their flocks. But anyone who recalls the conclusion of Tender Is the Flesh knows that Bazterrica doesn’t coddle her readers, and that is the case here as well, though I found myself fruitlessly yearning for a happy ending. The novel does allow for glimmers of hope in the darkness, however, chief among them the possibility of love and recapturing the ability to believe in oneself instead of the lies one is told. They’re tenuous threads but worth hanging on to in the face of tremendous uncertainty about what lies ahead.