Book Review: ‘Pink Slime,’ by Fernanda Trías, translated by Heather Cleary

PINK SLIME, by Fernanda Trías. Translated by Heather Cleary.

The Uruguayan writer Fernanda Trías’s second novel to be published in English, “Pink Slime” — which was the winner of several literary awards in Uruguay and is elegantly translated here by Heather Cleary — is a well-imagined, often poetically beautiful plague story.

The tale takes place in a small coastal city where an environmental disaster has unspooled. An algal bloom in the ocean that has turned the waters red has become airborne, growing into a toxic wind that appears regularly and obliterates all living creatures in its path. In the grim, semi-derelict town that’s left, even the birds have disappeared. Despite the tragedy, our narrator, an unnamed woman, stubbornly remains one of the few holdouts who stay in town after most of the populace flees to the relative safety of the country’s interior.

For some time, even before the bloom, the town’s locals have based their diets on an extruded meat product laced with ammonia, a profile U.S. readers may recognize from a real-life controversy in 2012. This pink slime, branded as “Meatrite” in the novel, has long been manufactured for the people’s consumption, first in an old, nearby factory and then in a newer, better replacement plant, much touted by the government. Though it’s never stated, a possible causal connection between the processing of animals into pink slime and the appearance of the red tide hovers in the background.

When she’s not foraging for food, the narrator occupies herself by taking care of Mauro, a boy with a rare chromosomal disorder (presumably Prader-Willi syndrome, though it’s never named) — which, along with permanently stunting his cognitive development, keeps him so ravenous that he eats compulsively. She alternates her caregiving with visits to her suicidal, vaguely sadistic ex-husband, Max, to whom she’s drawn as if “by an elastic band” that constantly pulls her back into his cold embrace. Having deliberately walked into the toxic wind, Max languishes in the chronic ward of a nearby clinic, neither exactly terminal nor fit to be released. Meanwhile, the narrator’s irritating mother has also chosen to linger in the area, renting an abandoned mansion in a tony part of the city inconveniently distant from the narrator’s modest apartment.