The Desert and Its Seed chronicles the aftermath of an attack identical to the one that Baron Biza’s father perpetrated against his mother. Baron Biza maintains [a] mixture of unflinching scrutiny and cool lyricism through the novel. It feels strikingly of the moment, as a resurgent feminist movement draws attention to the wide scope of misogyny.
— Alejandro Chacoff, The New Yorker
Only now discovered in English, a modern Argentinian classic based on the tragic lives of the notorious writer (and wealthy politician) Raúl Barón Biza and his tragic wife
The Desert and Its Seed opens with a taxi ride to the hospital: a recently- separated wife’s face is disintegrating from acid thrown by her ex-husband while they signed divorce papers. Mario, their son, tries to wipe the acid from his mother’s cheeks but his own fingers burn.
What follows is a fruitless attempt to reconstruct her face— first in Buenos Aires, thereafter in Milan. Mario, the narrator, becomes the shadow and witness of the reconstruction attempts to repair his mother’s outraged flesh. In this role, he must confront his own terrible existence and identity, both of which are bound to an Argentina he sees disintegrating around him.
Based on his own true, tragic family story, Jorge Barón Biza’s The Desert and Its Seed was rejected by publishers in Buenos Aires and was finally self- published in 1998, three years before the author committed suicide. Written in a captivating plain style with dark, bitter humor, The Desert and Its Seed has become a modern classic, published to enormous acclaim throughout the Spanish-speaking world and translated into many languages and now, for the first time, into English.
The Desert and Its Seed chronicles the aftermath of an attack identical to the one that Baron Biza’s father perpetrated against his mother. Baron Biza maintains [a] mixture of unflinching scrutiny and cool lyricism through the novel. It feels strikingly of the moment, as a resurgent feminist movement draws attention to the wide scope of misogyny.
— Alejandro Chacoff, The New Yorker
A marvel.
— *4Columns
An emotionally (and physically) harrowing account of isolation, violence, and hypocrisy.
— Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders
A provocative, meticulous novel that’s both utterly repulsive and morbidly fascinating.
— Booklist
An Argentinian masterpiece.
— La Stampa
A sublime explosion that results from an unpredictable art.