Seed

by Mustafa Mutabaruka

Fiction. Written in a tense, halting style that mirrors the strained, unsettling urgency of the protagonist, SEED weaves its competing narratives together into a singular voice in which abrasive violence and lyric beauty frequently overlap, and in which violence and redemption converge toward a common destiny. "Mustafa Mutabaruka's exceptional debut novel SEED has the resonance of a Greek myth and the immediacy of a slashing noir mystery. Moving from a lonely American farmhouse to the bathhouses of Morocco, from a barbarous past tot he sweetness of erotic love, SEED is bleak, brilliant, powerfully hallucinatory"--Joseph Cummins (author of THE SNOW TRAIN, available from SPD).

178 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2002

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

The real truth, though, the reality of our lives, well I won't even guess where that lives. Maybe it just disappears. Do you think? Just crumbles away like--like a charred piece of paper. Or worse, it was never real to begin with. Like,who knows, maybe it was just something we imagined along the way. Do you think?

Adrift in Morocco after a performance is canceled, a young black dancer navigates treacherous spaces of memory (the stories of self, father, and grandfather superimposed in an oneiric farmhouse) and an unstable present with a cast of ghosts. It's the post-modern southern gothic of Coleman Dowell, perhaps, tempered with a brusque contemporary voice, at times elegantly minimal, at times highly evocative, at times bracing. Mustafa Mutabaruka has only this single novel to his name (and no other information about), but I desperately hope he's got more, yet unpublished or in the works, as this is one of the best contemporary debuts I can think of. Original, thoughtful, provocative, assured, tracing a half-seen generational moebius strip, or a kind of recursive X-shape drawn in blood. This demands more readers.

Plucked blindly from a shelf at Unnameable Books and immediately intriguing, this delivered much more than expected. Seed continues a recent streak of excellent reading luck, but is perhaps the best of that bunch, even. I have no idea how this failed to cause more of a stir upon release, but there's no time like now to pick it up.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

haunting. i think the whole book was a dream and he was on the farm the whole time with his dead father. the revelation about the grandfather didn't strike very real with me for some reason. and it was all bad enough without that.

[Bev · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that forces you to concentrate and get to know the main players. I can't say I liked the characters in the book. It seems that each person is following their own adgenda. My understanding happened at the end of the book and I wanted more. But it is beautifully written and the tragic stories pulls you in until the end to find out what has happened in the past to make the characters act the way they do.

[Warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Multi-layered but at the same time, simple and straightforward. The author jumps back and forth, in time and locale. It packs romance, sexual abuse, vacations, light sadism, infidelity, homosexuality and more in this tiny volume; and it works.