BOOKS FROM URUGUAYPink Slime
Tags:
Set in Uruguay
Female author
Description:
Winner of the Uruguayan National Literature Prize for Fiction, the Bartolomé-Hidalgo Fiction Prize, and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize. A port city is in the grips of an ecological crisis. The river has filled with toxic algae, and a deadly 'red wind' blows through its streets; much of the coast has been evacuated as the wealthy migrate inland to safety, leaving the rest to shelter in abandoned houses as blackouts and food shortages abound. The unnamed narrator is one of those who has stayed. She spends her days trying to disentangle herself from the two relationships that had once meant everything to her, and looking after the young boy who's been placed in her care. As the world in which they move becomes smaller, she reflects on the collapse of the other emotional ties in her life and the emergence of a radical yet tender solitude. With striking prose and vivid characters, the multi-award-winning Pink Slime offers profound reflections on motherhood, marriage, and caregiving, set against the backdrop of a crumbling city.
Reviews:
(10 months ago) |
04 Dec, 2024
Read 30 Nov 24
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(2 months ago) |
21 Jul, 2025
Depressing AF. This is not the story of a woman and the people who depend on her, it is the story of a woman who can’t let go of the past and who tries to fulfill her life with people who are not as invested as she is in their relationships.
The story also lacks subtlety. The parallels (an algae that kills people, a boy with Prader-Willi syndrome, a black market with ever increasing costs, a city slowly being abandoned) are too blatantly comparisons with the main character’s life. The sadness this book creates is not a cathartic release but an infuriating exasperation at a woman unable to face reality and unwilling to try and grow as a person. I too would have abandoned her long ago. |
(2 months ago) |
28 Jul, 2025
Good writing, but didn’t really capture me.
It reminded me of the Memory Police with its air of dread and slowly advancing doom in a small town, with a main character showing some weird form of depression, apathy or indifference, and with the plot being a tool to investigate broader issues like memory, despair and holding onto the past. But Pink Slime conjures a more corporeal and repellant end-of-the-world than Memory police. The writing in Pink Slime creates a sensation of repulsion and disquiet, like a less extreme version of a Cronenberg body-horror film, or the unsettling impression created by Argentine writers like Schweblin. Note: pink slime is an actual, and controversial, ‘meat product’. Look it up
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