What about a virus that ends up spreading among humans is no longer a chilling fictional plot but a feeling that dystopia may have come to stay.
So novels like this hint at a sinister, devastatingly accurate narrative gift of opportunity. Let's hope that the future of our days does not appear to us as a resurgence of extremes like those narrated, even with a cannibalism necessary for survival.
But nothing sounds so far away now, no matter how remote we are represented. Who was going to tell us that everyone would walk down the street with masks, afraid of inoculating the virus with the necessary vital oxygen?
Dystopias have gone from being located on the science fiction shelves of bookstores and libraries to moving to the current affairs section, rethinking the character of the fantastic as literature of greater weight. It has been little by little, since Margaret Atwood and her feminist recidivism from the maid's tale to the viral apocalypse that hovers on the threshold of the fully real ...
Because of a deadly virus that affects animals and infects humans, the world has become a gray, skeptical and inhospitable place, and society is divided between those who eat and those who are eaten.
What remainder of humanism can fit when the bodies of the dead are cremated to avoid their consumption? Where is the link with the other if, really, we are what we eat? In this ruthless dystopia as brutal as it is subtle, as allegorical as it is realistic, Agustina Bazterrica inspires, with the explosive power of fiction, sensations and highly topical debates.
In animals we may not appreciate the cruelty of the food chain. When we observe the lion eating the gazelle, we assume the fate of things. But of course, what happens when the need and urgency passes to the human stage. The reason, the differential fact is then overshadowed to pose unimaginable dilemmas.
You can now buy the novel «Exquisite Corpse», a book by Agustina Bazterrica, here: