by Graciliano Ramos

Born in the Brazilian state of Alagoas in 1892, Graciliano Ramos spent his first years in the sertão, the semiarid northeastern interior where Barren Lives takes place. One of his earliest recollections, recorded in his memoirs of youth, Infância (1945), is of a parched, burnt landscape seared into memory by a feeling of unquenchable thirst. The author’s later personal history informs Barren Lives’s concern with the profound social inequities of the region. Ramos wrote the novel shortly after his release from prison in 1937. Two years earlier the increasingly despotic government of Getúlio Vargas unleashed a campaign of mass persecutions in response to a communist uprising. Although he was not a member of the Communist Party at the time and was never formally accused of anything, Ramos was swept up in Vargas’s repressive campaign and spent ten months in prison...