short review of pink slime by fernanda trías

25 Feb, 2025

quite a bit of this was interesting but it needed a disability auditor. the narrator lives in a city "ravaged by a mysterious plague," with red algae blooms and strong winds coming in from the water that cause people to waste away, their skin peeling off. she divides her time between her ex-husband max, in chronic care at the hospital, her abusive mother, and mauro, the boy she's paid to take care of.

i wanted to talk mostly about mauro. he has prader-willi syndrome. due to this, he always feels like he is starving, and the narrator has to lock down everything he might see as food. people with PWS often have mild/borderline intellectual or learning disabilities, but the depiction of mauro goes even further. he is portrayed as having no real desires or interiority outside of looking for his next meal.

As time went by, I began to think of the syndrome as an impostor that had taken over Mauro's body (p52)
Mauro didn't react at all; it was as if he didn't hear me, as if he didn't remember life in the countryside...I wondered what his memories were like, whether he had a sense of the past or if his illness held him captive in an eternal present, a here and now made of hunger and craving (158)
As short as [his mother] is, she will look tall beside her sick child, beside the syndrome crumpled on the hallway carpet...a rock shaped like a human (208)

he's also very fat bc of his unrelenting hunger.

[The woman] studied his adipose arms, the jowls disfiguring his neck, and his small, puffy, strangely nimble hands (51)
I performed my tasks mechanically, like a worker in a poultry plant; I dressed and undressed him, cut his nails, ran a sponge along the folds of his adipose anatomy (91)

of course there's the 'literary benefit' to having this syndrome: it fits in with the meat plant, that provides jobs and food - its product, meatrite, the titular cups of pink slime that comprise the bulk of their diets in the apocalypse - red algae - the skin-peeling plague - yes, of course there's also a boy-machine with insatiable hunger that the narrator is paid to control. of course there's some sort of walking disease with no interiority. it makes 'sense'. but besides a symbol, this is also a depiction of a human with a disability. mauro has other interests, he draws and plays with dinosaurs and looks for the moon and birds outside his window and watches TV. he speaks to himself in his own made-up language. but rather than his alterity being proof of his selfhood, it's proof that he lacks selfhood.

anyway this book/the narrator suffers badly from 'caretaker brain' and while i'm sure people DO experience their charges as unthinking, stupid, slow, meat-machinery, it's not something i'm particularly interested in exploring.