Fernanda Trías’ Pink Slime is bathed in evocative reds and pinks, a color soaked alternative to the mushy brown and gray-scaped apocalypses of a typical book of its kind. Unfortunately, thats about the only fresh thing it brings to the subject.

An unnamed narrating character navigates difficult living conditions while also sifting through her memories. Many of these revolve around her mother, or the boy Mauro, whom she nannies. Mauro has a strange disease which causes him to eat both compulsively and constantly, even harmful things he finds in the trash. Looming largest, however, is the relationship with her ex husband Max, to whom the narrating character is hopelessly tied. He is recovering in the “chronic care” unit of a local hospital, and is perhaps the main reason the narrating character won’t take her nannying money and flee the coast. Max is not an interesting narcissist, despite the book repeatedly describing his magnetism. Each chapter is bookended by snippets of conversation that she’s had with him (or I presume with her mother or Mauro. Its clear which of these “deep” observations come from Max.) They include such profundities as -

If you're given a box full of air, what is the gift?

or

That face. A girl disguised as a monster?

'Or a monster disguised as a girl?'

'Does it matter?' he asked.

'It matters to me.'

'The monster and the girl were one.'

By the time the book has tread and retread the past, very little ground is ultimately covered, and I was left wondering what exactly I was supposed to have taken away from this book. While there are some truly striking depictions in Pink Slime - for example I love this description of the fog as

…pressed firm as a muscle against my body, forming a kind of amorphous suit.

- there were also some painfully obvious and clunky metaphors. This one felt particularly heavy handed to me:

That's what we are when we're born: meat paste gasping for air, little balls of pink slime that, once we're pushed out, have no choice but to agglutinate to that other body, the mother's, biting down hard on the teat of life.

The book’s short length was also a drawbac, as the relationships which were so central to its storytelling weren’t given enough space to expand into anything interesting. Max in particular needed more time to convince me of his supposed gravitational pull. I would have actually liked more time with Mauro as well.

All of that said, it wasn’t an unpleasant reading experience in the immediate sense. I enjoyed the writing overall, and would probably give the author another chance.

Pink Slime

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