“The Unworthy Ones” by Agustina Bazterrica: A Dystopian Novel Addressing Religious Oppression and Transformational Reads

In an apocalyptic society, a group of women live confined in a religious congregation where physical and mental pressure reigns. One of them secretly writes a diary in which she questions the very cult to which she is subjected. Who is this male god they worship and why is he never seen? In The unworthy onesone of our novels of the year, Agustina Bazterrica It uses dystopia to address eternal themes: religion, oppression, violence and hope. We spoke with her and she also recommends several books that transform you inside.

Books that transform you inside, recommended by Agustina Bazterrica

The unworthy ones It is born from several concerns, starting from Agustina Bazterrica’s own childhood. “First is my own personal experience in a school of German nuns,” the author recalls. “I clarify that not all nuns are the same. My mother went to a school of Jesuit nuns and she had such a good time that she said she would send my daughters to a school of German nuns. But she miscalculated because German nuns and Jesuits are not equal. These German nuns created this climate of oppression, and the school was like a big panopticon. You had the nuns, the teachers, all women, the priest was the only male, and we controlled each other. If you didn’t have control of the school, you had control of God. That is one of my obsessions, asking myself why we believe in the things we believe.”

The unworthy ones

Agustina Bazterrica

ALFAGUARA

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Another experience of my own triggered the idea for the novel. “What made it click for me to start thinking about this story was a visit to the Santa Catalina monastery in Peru,” Bazterrica explains. “I visited it because I studied art history, and that monastery has a great heritage of a type of iconography that interests me a lot, which are the harquebusier angels. The reality is that the monastery was sinister. I entered a room and almost had a heart attack from terror, because there was a nun praying who was actually a mannequin. I left there saying ‘I have to write something about nuns.’

In The unworthy ones, that experience with religion is mixed with that of the extreme control of sects. “I researched them, because I always wondered how it is possible that perhaps very prepared, very cultured, very intelligent people are captured by sects,” he says. “There are many control mechanisms, and one is to generate fear. When you generate fear, what you do is generate vulnerability and, therefore, defenses are lowered and people are easier to capture. There are also other mechanisms, for example peer pressure, wanting to belong to the tribe. For the oppressors to have so much power there must be accomplices within the oppressed. That’s why in the novel they change their names, they dress them all the same, there are mantras…”

Bazterrica, who already in his previous novel, exquisite corpse used a dystopian approach, working with reality to propose scenarios that are not as far away as we might think. “Milei and her team are against the right to abortion, which we achieved after years and years of fighting and taking to the streets,” she remembers. “That’s what Simone de Beauvoir said, when there are crisis situations, the rights of people in general, but especially women, are always at risk. What I do with Las unworthy and with Cadaver exquisite is take questions or issues that affect me, that seem unfair to me, to the absolute extreme.”