Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird: Stories. Agustina Bazterrica. 2020 (Translated into English by Sarah Moses, 2023)
I was so excited to read this collection, and I know you can see a “but” coming. There isn’t much of one. Like a lot of people, I’d recently read Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh, and was knocked off my feet by it. The premise of that novel is so shocking and bold, and the ways she used it to explore patriarchy, capitalism, labor, repressive states - it was expertly done. The last line of the book is still one I think about all the time. I’d rank it with the “for life, as it were” that closes Washington Square for the way it focuses everything that came before.
I think what makes Tender is the Flesh so compelling is Bazterrica’s ability to convey alienation, both personal and political. This is in large part the subject of her novel: it takes the way people are dehumanized by modern, industrial and post-industrial capitalism and makes that dehumanization almost literal. It’s about the ways in which that process of dehumanization of the victims, necessary to make capitalism function, also turns the beneficiaries into monsters. It’s about what becoming a monster must feel like. It is utterly terrifying.
Here is the “but,” finally. I could tell from this collection that this theme interests Bazterrica - that she likes telling stories about being alienated. Nearly every story here is about that: about not having the reaction to something you know you should, and not knowing why; about not experiencing your own body as you, but instead as something you carry around with you to be looked at or given or stolen away; about trying to forge connections and failing. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn’t.
When the alienation in the theme meets the alienated tone, it worked. I really enjoyed several stories here, but honestly none quite as much as the first two: “A Light, Swift and Monstrous Sound” and “Roberto.” Each was like a punch in the stomach, in the same way Tender is the Flesh was. But there’s diminishing returns, unfortunately - none of the other stories in this volume grabbed me quite as much. They all had the same kind of off-putting coldness that makes Bazterrica’s writing so effective at its best, but I found them wanting without a good hook.
It looks like there’s a good hook in Bazterrica’s latest novel, which I plan to read in the new year. She’s very good, as good and fearless a writer of dystopias as any of the greats. I do think the novel might be her form in a way the short story isn’t. That’s not a crime.