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Inside a Sadistic Sisterhood at the End of the World
In Agustina Bazterrica’s new novel, “The Unworthy,” a dystopian future ravaged by climate change has stripped the world of food, water and human connection.
THE UNWORTHY, by Agustina Bazterrica; translated by Sarah Moses
Writers have long been preoccupied with the end of the world, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the true preoccupation is with whatever new, tenuous social order struggles up from the rubble. What would starting over look like? And are human beings doomed to create dystopian conditions wherever they go?
In the Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica’s brilliant, chilling new novel, “The Unworthy,” the young, unnamed narrator enters a religious order called the House of the Sacred Sisterhood after spending an unspecified amount of time wandering a landscape ravaged by climate catastrophe. Is this place, overseen by the Superior Sister and an unseen, all-powerful He, a refuge or a nightmare? And what exactly happens when a member of the unworthy class is elevated to the rank of the Chosen?
These are among the questions that propel this slim, suspenseful novel. Amid global hunger and drought the Sacred Sisterhood has managed to cultivate a steady food supply — even if it involves eating a lot of crickets — and drinkable water.But danger abounds. The hierarchy is at once enigmatic and brutally enforced. Sacrifices are demanded. The punishments for infractions, administered by the sadistic Superior Sister, include whipping, disfigurement and being buried or burned alive.
The mind-bending violence crushes any possibility of fellowship between the women who have found their way to this place (in the opening chapter, the narrator recounts dropping cockroaches into the pillowcase of another sister and then sewing up the slip). The unworthy are quick to turn on one another, claws out and teeth bared, in the name of survival.
The horror is made visceral by Bazterrica’s feverish, mythic prose, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses: “There’s something sick in the wind, a warm stupor of venom and insects. A curse creeping out of the devastated lands. We can feel the vibration of something destructive coming into being. … Something was throbbing in the air, silent and bestial.” Some sentences break off midstream; others contain words crossed out. We witness the narrator’s struggle to wrest the unspeakable into language.
