The Unworthy

A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS

A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.

This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.

The Unworthy
Agustina Bazterrica

You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.

Well that was a trip and a half. I read this book in one day and I am exactly as traumatized as Lori told me I would be. (“Okay, cool,” I said as I hurled myself head first into the thornbush. Will I never learn?) Anyway, I am shell-shocked, grieving, and somehow strangely uplifted, and I’ve already bought the audio book and I’m planning to buy it on Kindle as well, and I am currently rushing to finish this review because I characteristically did not read the book until two days after it was due back at the library and now we’re up to day three.

Nobody knows how the cult got started or how long it’s been around, and that’s frankly not the point. The point is that the world went to shit some time ago – a series of escalating natural disasters decimated human society, and the survivors are few and prone to extreme violence as they pursue an ever-dwindling stock of edible resources – and the House of the Sacred Sisterhood established itself among the ashes after slaughtering a monastery’s worth of monks. Despite its Catholic overtones, the Sisterhood has rejected the Christian God, holding him and his entire family responsible for the state of the world, and has instead embraced a deity apparently of its own creation (still referred to as “God”). Cloistered in relative safety, at least as far as the rest of the world goes, the fractious Sisterhood is nothing more nor less than an all-female cult shepherded by the Superior Sister, a mountain of a woman who keeps the herd in line, and rigidly controlled by the one man on the premises. Make of that information what you will.

Below the Superior Sister, there is an order of women who are known as the Enlightened, which is the highest state one can attain within the cult; and then there are the Chosen, who are further subdivided into Minor Saints, Diaphanous Spirits, and Full Auras. The very lowest order is called “the unworthy,” and is filled with the miscellaneous women who aren’t attractive enough to be elevated to Enlightened or Chosen. These unworthies are bombarded with daily lectures on their inherent unworthiness, suffer insane punishments for infractions large and small, and are expected to joyfully self-mutilate as needed, that is, when the higher-ups decree that sacrifices must be made. While the higher orders eat real food grown in the Sisterhood’s garden, the unworthies are fed mostly crickets, except at funerals, when they are given special pastries (made with cricket flour) and coffee. With no other outlet for their rage and resentment, they regularly turn upon each other, though they risk torturous punishment if they are caught attacking other unworthies.

All of this is revealed through the secret diary kept by an unnamed unworthy (hereafter referred to as “N,” standing for “narrator”), written with real ink pilfered from the dead monks, makeshift ink made from ingredients surreptitiously collected, or blood on the days when she can’t get anything else. Her writings are concealed in a variety of ways, and she has yet to get caught, which is quite fortunate for her. In addition to the torments of her daily life, N documents scattered memories of her life before the Sisterhood: her mother, who died sometime around the total collapse of society, leaving the teenaged N orphaned; her small clan of wild children, who called themselves “the tarantula kids” and banded together for mutual survival, only to be brutally murdered; her relationship with Helena, an unworthy who took her into the Sisterhood against orders, and who was buried alive after N betrayed her; and, most painfully, her bond with a feral cat she named Circe, which came to a terrible end when Circe was stabbed to death while trying to defend N from a gang of rapists.

Despite the heretical tone and content of her work, N longs to be consecrated as an Enlightened, though every unworthy knows that the next Enlightened will most likely be a woman named Lourdes, who is both physically attractive and eager to distinguish herself by making her fellow unworthies absolutely miserable. As a result, they all despise her; in fact, N introduces herself to us by announcing that she has sewn live cockroaches into Lourdes’s pillowcase. To the delight of her many detractors, Lourdes’s candidacy goes up in smoke with the arrival of a new unworthy renamed Lucía, even more beautiful and seemingly endowed with a level of holiness that impresses everyone from the unworthies to the Superior Sister to the man who claims to speak for God Himself. While Lourdes’s anti-Lucía machinations backfire spectacularly, N sets out to protect Lucía, in whose presence she experiences unaccustomed feelings of rapture. Lucía returns her interest, and they begin a passionate, emotionally intimate affair. Meanwhile, a Minor Saint and a Diaphanous Spirit turn up dead, both visibly pregnant, and their deaths are promptly blamed upon the unworthy.

Eventually N succeeds in poisoning Lourdes with amanita mushrooms, which are non-fatal but still cause Lourdes to lose her mind and dance naked in the garden. Shortly after this incident, N and Lucía witness Lourdes’s private punishment and attack the Superior Sister in an effort to save her, but later find Lourdes hanging from a tree. To make matters worse, Lucía is consecrated as the newest Enlightened, and she disappears into the room in which the Enlightened are kept in total isolation. N breaks into this room and finds the Enlightened in varying states of pregnancy, looking on as Lucía is raped by the man who would be God under the supervision of the Superior Sister. The ensuing fight leaves N mortally wounded, but she and Lucía manage to flee the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, together with a handful of Enlightened, unworthies, and servants. Knowing she has very little time left, N shares an emotional goodbye with Lucía, then settles down to write as much as she can with the blood from her wound, intending to hide her writings for future generations to find. The account ends with her listening to the bells of the House, waiting for retribution to find her.

My prevailing thought: If that man did not intend to sire an entire clan-cult, He really should’ve invested in some form of birth control. Oh, iT jUsT dOeSn’T fEeL rIgHt? TOO BAD. There is nothing in His rhetoric or His behavior to suggest that He has any interest in fathering a monasteryful of offspring; children do not exist within the walls of the Sisterhood, and pregnant Sisters do not seem to be particularly well cared-for, given that two of them were allowed to die. It is impossible to say whether their deaths were intentional or not. It is entirely possible that He simply saw pregnancy and childbirth – both hazardous in and of themselves – as a convenient tool to free up room for younger, fresher women. As far as I can tell, there is no five-year plan and the whole Sisterhood is the fucked-up brainchild of a predator who cannot keep it in His pants, which honestly isn’t much of a mystery when dead pregnant women keep turning up all over campus and the Sisterhood as a whole places such an emphasis upon physical perfection. I figured pretty much from the start that it had to be an elaborate harem with a religious kink, but jeez, Dude.

My second thought: Is there actually some supernatural force at work here, or is everyone just crazy? Or is it a little bit of both? All those holy visions recorded by N – the magic of the Chosen, Lucía’s apparent powers – are those real, or are they the product of regular contact with water from the Creek of Madness? Perhaps from slivers of amanita strategically slipped into food before it is served? Are all of these things genuinely seen by N, or is she seeing them because she expects to see them? Do the Enlightened genuinely have the power to predict such events as acid rain, or are their pronouncements entirely written and communicated by Him? We never find out and I suppose it doesn’t matter, though I would like to know just the same. I am also curious about the language spoken by the Sisterhood, which is forced upon everyone who enters the gates of the House. It is not French or Spanish, which N does not speak, or at least she doesn’t in the English translation. We know this from the snippets she hears from others and records entirely phonetically: “Salu, Marie, plen de gras, vousette beni entre tute lay fam¹” from Mariel, another unworthy; “Por fevor, telorego. Por fevor²” from Lucía. It is unlikely to be Latin because Lucía arrives fully fluent, and I cannot imagine anyone resurrecting Latin from its grave at the end of the world. English, then? Portuguese? Italian? I have no idea where we are in this broken world or where any of the characters come from, though whatever this language is, I am assuming it is native to Him and the Superior Sister. I would be curious to read this in the original Spanish, just to see if Lucía’s dialogue changes.

On the other hand, none of this actually matters. It doesn’t matter if the magic is real or if the water induces literal madness, or if the characters are all inexplicably speaking Sindarin. N is the maelstrom at the center of the story, and she is the force that kept me turning page after page after page until there were no more pages to turn. She is intelligent, adaptable, funny, resourceful, willful, skeptical, credulous, selfish, petty, faithless, faithful, generous, short-sighted, cruel, loving, even kind, after a fashion. She is equally capable of sharing her few resources with a hungry cat and crushing up cockroaches to sprinkle on Lourdes’s bed just out of sheer spite, and I love her. Even in the midst of a gang rape, her first thought is for Circe’s safety, and Circe is the first thing she goes looking for in the aftermath of the attack. Yet at the same time she betrays Helena, with whom she shared a loving relationship, and coldly claims not to miss her, though her onslaught of memories says otherwise. She revels in the punishments meted out to the other unworthies and the servants (as the unworthies and the servants revel in the punishments dealt to her: the viciousness of the Sisterhood is cyclic), but doesn’t hesitate to help Lucía in her attempt to save Lourdes. I won’t go so far as to say that she does this for Lourdes’s own sake, because she doesn’t, but she isn’t completely dehumanized. Even with the trauma and the gaslighting and the torture and the abuse and the violent rivalries, she can still show vulnerability and affection with Helena and Lucía and Circe and the tarantula kids.

When I first read the goodreads synopsis, I thought this book would be a kind of spiritual sister to The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood), and I was sort of right. There are definitely similarities, but The Unworthy is far more microscopic in its scope, its Gilead entirely confined within the walls of a stolen monastery and theoretically ruled by a God who would not be recognized under Gileadean Christianity. Though there are whispers of life beyond the walls of the Sisterhood, a planet slowly reviving itself the way it did in WALL-E, these are never definitively confirmed, and in a way I’m glad. Given the ultra-concentrated misery depicted in the book, any glimpse of the world outside – the world in the present day, that is, not in the past chronicled by N – would have diluted Bazterrica’s vision of this truly horrifying cult, and the book as a whole would have been less effective. The fragments we get from N’s writings are enough. I don’t need to know more.

As regards the death of Circe: If you’re familiar with me, or at least vaguely familiar with this blog and its contents, you should have seen at least one photo of my real-life enchantress by now. Lori told me that this book would kill me, and it’s not that I didn’t believe her, it’s just that I didn’t predict how incredibly specific it would be in its premeditated murder of me. I did not realize that my cat would have anything to do with it until N first mentioned her own Circe during the course of her surreptitious journaling, and I saw the exact shape of my heartbreak. I will admit that there was a teeny-tiny corner of me that hoped that Circe was some kind of dog or wolf, because she is never explicitly named as a cat; but later writings, in which Circe’s behavior and general attitude are described in greater detail, quickly put paid to that delusion. Yet even knowing what was coming, what had to be coming, I was utterly unprepared for the unceremonious brutality of the fictional Circe’s death. If I could reach into the book and crush every single one of those men under my thumb just to keep Circe alive for another hour, another minute, I would do it with absolutely zero thoughts in my head. I mildly resent my Circe for having completely no idea that I am grieving for her in literary form. Instead she just wants her dinner. HER DINNER?!?!?! MOMMY IS MOURNING HERE.

My crushingly insensitive cat aside, and in spite of the brutal murder of her fictional counterpart, I can easily see myself revisiting this book as many times as I have read The Handmaid’s Tale. If anything, I actually slightly prefer The Unworthy: it lacks Gilead’s breeding kink, which is woven into every level of that society, and N is just so fed up and so ready to brawl on maybe sixty seconds’ notice that I almost feel like I have to vote her into every office possible. I love the gorgeous, dreamlike style in which the book is written. I love the idea that we are the future (even though we patently are not), reading N’s story from the scraps of paper we somehow managed to salvage from the roots of the tree in which she hid them, not unlike Offred’s secret recordings. I would like to think that her writing survived the ages, and that it will continue to survive. I would like to think that she and Circe and Helena and Lucía will be remembered the way she wants them to be remembered. Though if nothing else, it is good to know that the cat distribution system will remain fully functional through the end of the world.

All of this is an incredibly long and loquacious way of telling you to read the goddamn book. I just got it on Kindle midway through this review – you see, I told you I would – and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s not for everyone – its middling rating on goodreads attests to that fact – but I still think it’s worth reading it through at least once. Just make sure to (re)name your cat something other than Circe, and you’ll be fine.

Abject thanks to Google Translate, because my high school French was not good enough or religious enough to guess what “beni” was supposed to be. And it took me much too fucking long to realize “lay fam” was supposed to be “les femmes” and not “les fam(ille)s,” wtf. Never mind that “blessed among all women” makes way more sense than “blessed among all families.” If I needed any proof that I need to brush up my French, I’ve got it now. I blame the spelling of “fam” for throwing me off. ‎(ﾉಥ益ಥ）ﾉ ┻━┻

¹Salut, Marie, pleine de grâce, vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes.
Hail, Mary, full of grace, you are blessed among all women.

²Por favor, te lo ruego. Por favor.
Please, I beg you. Please.