Pink Slime

Read 30 Nov 24

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.

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