The Desert and Its Seed
Jorge Barón Biza, Trans. by Camilo Ramirez
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Desert and Its Seed
Jorge Barón Biza, Trans. by Camilo Ramirez
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Barón Biza’s lone novel, first published in 1998 and now appearing in English translation after building a cult reputation in Argentina and beyond. Whatever else The Desert and Its Seed is, it’s hard not to read it as a roman à clef, or even a kind of suicide note. To leave it at that, however, would be to miss the drama that shapes the novel, recounted with cool distance in Barón Biza’s analytical prose: a cycle of immense cruelty and miraculous, but perhaps futile, regeneration.
It was decades before Biza crawled out from under his father’s shadow. After jobbing as an art critic and copy editor at various publications, he wrote The Desert and Its Seed, his only novel, in 1995. Rejected by publishers, it was ultimately self-published, in 1998 — three years before Biza, too, committed suicide. (His mother and sister also took their own lives.) The book, originally something of an underground hit, found a much wider audience when it was reissued in Argentina in 2013. It unfolds in the tragedy’s grim aftermath, hewing close to the facts (as Biza admitted in interviews). Nothing much happens on the level of plot..
Biza’s novel dives headfirst into the severely twisted familial dynamics that surround Mario, a deeply reflective, alcoholic narrator.
This ambitious novel, based on the lives of the late Barón Biza (1942–2001) and his parents, concerns the aftermath of an acid attack.