Paradise ignited

Agustina Bazterrica’s novels place the reader, again and again, at the end of the world. Her subjects are loss and monstrosity, societal breakdown and its aftermath. Her characters are tolerant of dire circumstances in a way that might be considered stoical if they weren’t so hauntingly detached, more or less skating atop reality. Her prose is a blunt instrument, simple but precise.

The Unworthy (Las indignas, 2023), Bazterrica’s third book to be translated into English by Sarah Moses, takes place in a world ravaged by ecological disaster. The narrator finds safety in a convent, a “small, pristine Eden” with clean resources, where she is fed and housed alongside a group of women, relieved of the pressures of survival so long as she submits to the violence of the Superior Sister and serves a faceless “He” hidden behind a chancel screen.

“The erroneous God, the false son, the negative mother” –  these are profanities among the Sacred Sisterhood. Ecological collapse is proof of the Christian God’s failures, so the women practise a new religion-as-hierarchy comprising servants, the unworthy, Minor Saints and the Enlightened, who are credited with keeping the convent “pure, resplendent”. It is a corrupt institution that maintains a neat balance of power and discipline – until a woman called Lucía arrives, and she and the narrator fall intensely, almost hysterically in love.

The Unworthy is a study of desire after catastrophe, guided by its loudest refrain, “Without faith there is no refuge”. The narrator must trust in the Sisterhood in order to tolerate its mortifications, but Lucía’s presence produces other experiences of “faith” and “refuge”. Her passion for Lucía, “a paradise on the verge of igniting”, is another dogma she submits to, a spiritual shelter that undermines the stability of the institution.

Bazterrica might argue that love isn’t the only place to find refuge during end times. The narrator has an equally intense and illicit relationship with her writing. Under cover of night, she jots down the story of her life. It would seem that notebook-keeping is a favoured pastime of protagonists in dystopian novels, from Margaret Atwood’s Offred to the unnamed protagonist of Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1963; The Wall, 1990). In each case the question emerges of who these women are writing for. And why. Setting pen to paper is not an act of calculated reason, but something these narrators do with necessity. It is a compulsion as much as a coping mechanism.

By writing her life down, the narrator forges a relationship with the future, counting on the possibility that “maybe one day … someone will read what I have written”. More than that, as with religious feeling or erotic conviction, the author seems to suggest that writing opens access to a deeper, more actual present. “Why put myself in danger with this book of the night?” the narrator asks. “But I have to, because if I write it then it was real.”

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