Reading Group Guide

PINK SLIME

Fernanda Trías

This reading group guide for Pink Slime includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

As an unknown plague ravages the port city she calls home, a woman finds herself reluctant to leave even as, all down the coast, most residents have begun the slow exodus inland. A mysterious algae bloom has poisoned the air, making regular food production a luxury of the past. To stave off famine, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a nauseating pink paste made of unknown animal products.

During the short reprieves between the deadly red windstorms, our narrator attends to her fraught relationship with her mother, her ex-husband, and Mauro, the young boy whom she nannies and who has been all but abandoned by his wealthy parents. Defying all logic in the face of worsening conditions with no end in sight, her desire to stay only hardens, even as her surroundings slowly become a ghost town.

Depicting a future not so distant from our own, Pink Slime attends to the death rattle of mutual care, community, and collectivity—the place where love, duty, and self-preservation converge, and what remains of fragility and the sublime at the end of the world.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. In the beginning, the narrator observes: “The squatters kept the sign lit, but not out of laziness or nostalgia. They did it to remind themselves they were alive. That they could still do something arbitrary, something purely aesthetic” (page 2). What other things, commonplace as they may seem to us, have become anachronistic luxuries in this dystopian future? What other choices, innocuous as they may be, do various characters make throughout the novel to assert their ongoing humanity in a period of unprecedented instability?

2. With hindsight, the narrator is able to see the vast differences between herself and her ex-husband, Max. For example, on a philosophical level, Max believes that “a person’s will [is] independent from their body,” (pages 4–5) leading him to attempt to “separate himself from his body, that indomitable desire-generating machine, which knew neither conscience nor limits” (page 5). The narrator feels differently but stops short of stating her own philosophy about human will and its relationship to the body. How would you characterize the narrator’s orientation to this question? Does she seem to have one? What other moments throughout the novel might help you answer this question?

3. At the beginning of each chapter is an imaginary dialogue. How did these dialogues affect your experience of the novel, specifically the chapters that they preceded? What function do they serve? As you were reading, how did you feel that these dialogues spoke to each other across chapters?

4. When we meet the narrator’s mother, it’s in a mansion in Los Pozos that she’s renting out at a steal from its owners, who want to avoid squatters taking over their property. Eating scones with the owners’ silver butter knives, the narrator notes these are “luxuries only a disaster could have afforded us” (page 11). What do you think she means by this?

5. As a rare “chronic,” Max’s ability to stay alive is medically baffling but coveted as the key to finding a cure for the mysterious plague brought on by the red wind. The narrator, however, seems to think that part of Max’s ability to stay alive is his innate stoicism: “the ability to stay alive by virtue of incredulity or indifference” (page 23). What is the narrator’s experience of Max’s prolonged illness? In what ways does it preternaturally extend their relationship?

6. Throughout the novel, the narrator returns again and again to the idea of a false beginning: “The beginning is never the beginning. What we often mistake for the beginning is just the moment we realize something has changed” (page 30). Find another passage in which the narrator contemplates this idea—why is she so intent on emphasizing this? Why is it so meaningful to her?

7. Mauro’s unnamed syndrome, an inability to feel full or think about anything other than eating, occupies the narrator’s every waking (and resting) moment while she’s caring for him. How does this bottomless need to consume, this perpetual emptiness, dramatize the growing privation of their surroundings?

8. The narrator’s caustic relationship with her mother is broached many times throughout the novel. Find a specific passage related to this and discuss it as a group—if their relationship is so negative, what continues to tether them together? What nuance can you find in the animosity they have for each other?

9. The narrator’s remaining relationships, those with her mother, Max, and Mauro, are peppered with irresolvable contradictions exacerbated by the rapid deterioration of the environment. Trías writes, “I’ve always confused fear with love: that unstable ground, that landslide zone” (page 68). There is certainly love in all these relationships, but where do you see fear operating in them? Do you agree with the narrator that love and fear are hard to distinguish from each other?

10. The narrator often reminisces about Delfa, the woman her mother employed to take care of her as a child. The question of caregiving and the responsibility we have to others is at the center of the novel. How does Delfa figure into this discussion? How does she complicate it and how does she illuminate it?

11. On page 87, the narrator likens the state’s providing of Meatrite, or pink slime, for a populace slowly being priced out of fresh food, to that of a mother’s thankless work of providing for her ungrateful children. What do you think of this comparison?

12. Throughout the novel, the narration will sometimes briefly change tense, from past to future, and then back again. Locate some of these moments. Why do you think Trías is doing this? What does it accomplish, and why do you think Trías has altered the tense of these specific passages?

13. The narrator is very suspicious of laundered narratives being fed to the public through radio and TV, having worked at a magazine called The Good Life, which churned out sanitized, peppy narratives about the climate disaster and resulting epidemic at the behest of the Ministry of Health. How do these narratives play a role in the novel? What other false narratives are at play, not disseminated by the state but circulated interpersonally and through the community itself?

14. While looking for a black market, the narrator stumbles upon a caged bird, disfigured by neglect and disease. What effect does it have on her? Do you think it has a symbolic quality? Discuss with the group.

15. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator begins throwing away her hard-earned money, the funds that will allow her to escape the town that is becoming more of a hellscape every day. What do you make of this decision? How do you understand this choice—what does it symbolize in the novel, what does it mean to her personally?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Read another work of speculative fiction that deals with resource depletion in a dystopian future, such as Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica. What similarities do you see between the novels? How would you compare their styles and their outlook on human nature?

2. Read Trías’s other novel available in English, The Rooftop. In what ways do you feel that these novels speak to each other? What themes and throughlines seem to link these novels together?

3. The “pink slime” of the novel resembles a commodity that currently exists in our world, allegedly used in the making of fast food. A large part of the novel is concerned with how the unsavory aspects of contemporary living are repackaged with a positive spin by corporations and the state. How are corporations of our world talking about our version of pink slime? Can you think of any other analogs for pink slime that currently exist in the food industry?

• Publisher: Scribner (July 2, 2024)
• Length: 240 pages
• ISBN13: 9781668049792