The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica
Reviewed by Emily Weedon
In The Unworthy, Agustina Bazterrica gives readers a relentlessly dark and bloody story of hysteria and mutilation which conjures the grotty religious fervour, mysticism, and hyper ordered life of the sere Christian Middle Ages while also dipping a toe into the currents of eco nihilism. In these cautious times, the book should come with a trigger warning for the sensitive. Readers without strong stomachs, beware. Readers who relish gore, horror and edginess, read on.
In The Unworthy, the narrator lives in a cult like convent, run by a catechism we do not know, in a future dystopia sometime after various climate cataclysms. Various strata of cult members eke out an existence of privation and rules, living for the days there are funerals, and they get to eat more than usual. Strangers arrive and change the balance of life while the narrator records all that happens, at her peril.
The prose will doubtless be called hypnotic and lyrical while I at times find it confusing and claustrophobically told by an unreliable narrator who has a narrow but embedded view of what is going on. It is a world which uses the power of absolutist religion in iconography and the endless ability of humans to harm one another. In some ways the dark cult the book explores recalls the Penitents from the time of the Inquisition, who would bind barbs to their waists or put thorns in their shoes among many other self-mutilations and tortures.
Comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale are inevitable, although the writing also recalls the way John Wyndham details The Chrysalids and Philip K Dick relates his dystopia in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The Unworthy is often confusing and sketchy because this is a murky work from an uncertain and dire future.
Much of the narrative is repetitive, litanous - the babbling and rambling of a person who is indoctrinated.
“It’s so easy with a dystopia to go too far, get too dark, lose all hope. This is not a book one should pick up if one is looking for a glimmer of hope in a dimming world.”
There is a hellish, broiling Book of Revelations kind of woo-woo mysticism, visions, madness and fanaticism intertwined. The sheer amount of repetitive violence is grinding. I get the idea that, because it is combined with a prophetic scrying climate doomsday story, it is permissible to be so grim and grisly. But in other hands, minus the climate message, this is as forcefully and even at times tediously violent as the Marquis de Sade’s work, or any of the Saw or similar Grindhouse horror films. There are multiple references to nipples being pierced with needles for example - if this was filmed, it would be considered exploitative porn, but in the pages of a translated piece of literary fiction, it is sanctified as art. It’s so easy with a dystopia to go too far, get too dark, lose all hope. This is not a book one should pick up if one is looking for a glimmer of hope in a dimming world.
The plot yields a predictable, and by now fairly hackneyed description of wanderers plundering abandoned homes for what food and valuables remain after multiple environmental catastrophes and feels like a trope straight out of zombie stories.
Vagueness persists through the description of an elevated class of beings, Auras and Minor Saints - are they spirits? Is this magical realism? Are they mutants, or hallucinations caused by bad water? It is unclear. With their sewed shut eyes, the Minor Saints bring to mind a nightmare concoction Guillermo Del Toro might imagine.
A lesbian love story that develops with a wandering woman who seems too good and too perfect to be true to me, as a reader, feels forced, rushed and unearned. A clue to the depth of the narrator’s feelings for this particular women is delivered through a syneasthesical conflation of smell which I found grating.
Ultimately, I think this work is intended most for those who are experiencing the worst of climate angst. The Unworthy reads like a recitation, a prophecy of what is to come, and will feel almost religiously important to some. I found it rolled out in an extremely on the nose fashion, bluntly, and crudely at times. I would go so far as to say it is a climate morality tale meant perhaps to terrorize readers into action. My problem with using literature to teach, direct, and moralize like this is that drinking from a firehose of gloom and despair in the real world makes reading about a fictional world of gloom and despair repetitive and such works do not galvanize me-- they freeze me into catatonia.
About the Author
Agustina Bazterrica, born in Buenos Aires in 1974, has a degree in arts from the University of Buenos Aires and works as a cultural manager and jury member in various literary contests. Her latest novel, The Unworthy, was published in Spanish in 2023 and received the same enthusiastic reception as Tender Is the Flesh, affirming Bazterrica’s status as a prominent author in contemporary literature.
About the Reviewer
Emily Weedon is a CSA award winning screenwriter and author of the dystopian debut Autokrator, with Cormorant Books. Her forthcoming novel Hemo Sapiens will be published in September 2025, with Dundurn Press. https://emilyweedon.com/
Book Details
Publisher : Scribner (March 4 2025)
Language : English
Paperback : 192 pages
ISBN-10 : 1668051885
ISBN-13 : 978-1668051887