In her column “Rage on the Page,” Melisa Guleryuz ’27 reviews books about anger in women’s literature.
Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
Agustina Bazterrica’s “The Unworthy” is not simply a novel — it’s a whispered confession, a feverish prayer. While her previous novel, “Tender Is the Flesh,” horrified readers with its vision of sanctioned cannibalism in a bureaucratic dystopia, “The Unworthy” strips that horror down to its barest elements: language, silence and the body as battleground. If her debut was about complicity, this one is about survival and the small, almost invisible ways a soul tries not to vanish when it has been declared worthless.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by a religious cult called the Sacred Sisterhood, “The Unworthy” follows an unnamed narrator — an “Unworthy” who isn’t deemed devoted enough to join the “Enlightened” yet — as she secretly records her life and thoughts using whatever she can find: dirt, blood, breath. She’s forbidden to write, speak freely or even exist with autonomy. But still, she writes.
“If I write it, then it was real,” she says. That one line contains the entire pulse of the book. Writing is not just catharsis here — it’s rebellion, it’s remembering and it’s an exorcism of everything the regime tries to erase.
What makes Bazterrica’s world so chilling is how uncannily familiar it feels, despite the surrealism. The Sacred Sisterhood enforces a brutal hierarchy: the Unworthy, the Chosen, the Enlightened — each tier is defined by ritual mutilation and self-denial. Eyes are sewn shut as a sign of spiritual purity. Tongues are cut to silence “unholy thought.” Pain is sanctified. Shame is mandatory. Theocracy and patriarchy collude in the shape of pious sisterhood, a paradox that mirrors real-world systems where women are both enforcers and victims of violence cloaked in sanctity. It’s the logic of control taken to its poetic, terrifying extreme.
And yet, Bazterrica doesn’t offer us a clean-cut dystopia or an obvious villain. Instead, she hands us fragments: partial truths, scrambled timelines, unreliable memories. “The truth is a sphere,” says Lucía, a new arrival whose presence unsettles the narrator and the very structure of the Sisterhood. “We never see it whole.”
“The Unworthy” does not have a linear narrative: it’s an unraveling of the narrator’s perception of the world. The narrator’s grasp on time, on truth and herself begin to decay as she writes. Her words blur fact with invention. Her faith fractures. Her memories stutter. The act of documentation becomes as slippery as the reality she’s trying to preserve.
What’s so potent about “The Unworthy” is how it transforms the literary act of writing into a visceral, almost bodily act of survival. The narrator uses her own fluids as ink and hides her writings in the crevices of her body. Each word is a wound, a pulse, a desperate claim to existence. The language is stark but poetic, and Sarah Moses’ Spanish to English translation captures its intensity without embellishment. It’s not flowery. It’s raw, like a scream muted by layers of gauze.
This book is also deeply metafictional. It constantly interrogates itself: why write? Who will read this? What’s the point? These are the questions any writer might ask, especially when writing from the margins or trauma. But in Bazterrica’s hands, these questions are literal. The narrator is risking death every time she writes. Her voice, however faint, is a threat to the system. The result is a book that feels like it shouldn’t exist, like it was smuggled out of the belly of some invisible prison.
“The Unworthy” is about spiritual violence masked as salvation. And while the former was more shocking, this one cuts deeper. It doesn’t flinch from despair, but it also doesn’t glamorize resistance. There are no heroes here — just women clinging to scraps of thought, of memory, of connection. It’s closer in spirit to “The Handmaid’s Tale” but stripped of plot, scaffolding or narrative ease.
For all its horror, “The Unworthy” is not hopeless. It’s agonizing, yes, but inside that agony is a refusal to disappear. The narrator may doubt her own memories and sanity, but she never stops trying to make sense of her experience. She never stops writing, even when it feels like language is failing her. “I try to capture that present, that now, but it blurs with every word,” she says. The act of writing may blur the truth, but it also ensures she’s not erased.
Ultimately, “The Unworthy” is about the necessity of bearing witness, of carving meaning from silence. It’s a claustrophobic, relentless and deeply philosophical work that lingers long after you’ve closed the final page. It doesn’t offer catharsis, but it does offer a strange, trembling kind of communion — with the narrator, with the act of survival and with anyone who’s ever felt their voice buried under the weight of someone else’s righteousness.