Fiction
Boulder
by Eva Baltasar
Description
Short, intense and full of dazzling images, Boulder is the story of a woman who wants to be alone. Life makes it very difficult for her and she betrays herself. After the successful Permagel/Permafrost, Eva Baltasar's second novel explores the contradictions of motherhood.
In 2018, Permagel/Permafrost became a 'must-read' thanks to an enthusiastic reception, although it did not have a great advertising campaign behind it. Written with functional prose, the book brought together the lesbian experience and the death wish with a touch of ironical rawness.
Translation rights of Permagel/Permafrost were acquired by Literatura Random House (World Spanish, already published), Verdier (France, publication Fall 2020), Nottetempo (Italy, already published), And Other Stories (World English, publication 2021), Kalandraka (Galician, to be published) andConfluencias (Portugal, to be published).
Two years later, Eva Baltasar (Barcelona, 1978) has published Boulder, the second novel of the triptych where Baltasar explores the voice, life and body of three women.
The book begins with the narrator in Chiloé (an island in Chile, in Patagonia), although she comes from a precarious situation in Barcelona. She flees the city and ends up embarking on a merchant ship and decides to stay there as a cook.
One day, when the ship is docked, the protagonist/narrator - nameless throughout the novel - falls in love with Samsa, an Icelandic geologist who ends up taking her to her island and who will call her Boulder. Driven by desire and what she assumes to be love, she leaves the ocean and her work on the ship, to move to land and start a typical life that she does not know if she will get used to. We will accompany Boulder on her journey to the common things: a house, a woman, and a daughter. The normality of a life from which she doesn’t know what to expect.
In Iceland Boulder and Samsa will live a more or less conventional life as a couple, but the protagonist will always keep an eye on her old life of isolation in the sea. When, after a few years in Iceland, Samsa tells Boulder that she wants to be a mother we already know that things will not go well because the protagonist has already warned us: "I am not a children person."
The protagonist's happiness is based on not feeling responsible for anything or anyone, not hurting anyone and making her life. As Eva Baltasar puts it, “loneliness can be hard, but it also frees you up." Boulder explores other major themes that we could also read in Permagel/Permafrost, such as motherhood and living as a couple, which can enrich you but also end up diluting you in that couple.
Through this relationship Eva Baltasar addresses issues such as couple relationships, and how these change before the arrival of motherhood. The author manages to give a twist to this topic and shows us a totally different perspective of motherhood from the one we are used to. It teaches us that there is another reality, another way of seeing it beyond that beautiful and happy stage that we have always been told. It also tells us about sexuality and how desire within a couple is transformed over the years, in a direct and taboo-free way.
The landscape is also very important in Boulder: desolate landscapes like the ones we find in Chiloé, the ocean or Iceland. It is those open spaces with few people around that the protagonist likes.
To say Eva Baltasar is also to speak of an elaborate, poetic language which makes the story slide smoothly. Boulder also reflects on this, because “language stakes us when we are born and shapes us, governs our cells.” Baltasar thinks that the way we speak also “builds us as people and sometimes we are not aware of it.”
More Information
Rights Information
Club Editor (Catalan), March 2020
Rights sold: Literatura Random House (Spanish), Verdier (French), Nottetempo (Italian), And Other Stories (English).
Marketing Information
In bestsellers lists for months.
Author's previous book shortlisted for the Médicis Étranger Award.
Reviews
“Boulder's action spans more than eight years, but the reader doesn't feel that way because the whole novel is written in the present and with short sentences. Everything has an air of immediacy, and at the same time one has the feeling that between sentence and sentence abysses open, ellipses that expand and ask the imagination of the reader to fill them. Boulder is a work of incandescent, volcanic brevity and density, full of phosphorescent metaphors.” - Nuvol
"With this book, Eva Baltasar deploys all her resources and envelops us with her talent, confirming once again, with this splendid novel, her great ability to make vital feelings awake.” - El matí.
“Built with a unitary structure, Boulder maintains an avid narrator, but is now in a stable and lasting relationship. The subject she addresses, with the same direct language - occasionally poetic - is motherhood. Eroticism is not as explicit as inPermagel, because now the transgression is different: the disintegration of the couple linked to the birth of a child." - El Periódico
“Baltasar writes about a lonely woman facing the maternity of her partner, like a boulder that holds everything.” – La Vanguardia
“An enemy of family ties, and jealous of the baby, the narrator does not resign herself to her new role of secondary character and reacts with alcohol and clandestine sex, as would a character by Charles Bukowski (an author with whom Baltasar shares more than one style trait). With Boulder, Eva Baltasar goes beyond Permagel, to the point that, as with Gillian Flynn's antiheroines, or the anti-superheroine Jessica Jones, the new femininity evokes the old masculinity.” – El Periódico
“Just as Eva Baltasar amazed me last year, she has continued to convince me now. Even more, because in these exceptional weeks I have found the pause and concentration necessary to fully soak up this new installment, and the effect has multiplied by ten.” – Libros y Literatura
“In her second work Baltasar continues to work on her approach to bodies as the substance of what is narrated; Around them, thinking both about sexuality and its interaction with affections, the author reconstructs our contemporary way of approaching the other.” - Zenda libros
“As in Permafrost, the body is key in this novel, and the reflections on desire and lack of it, on sex, on the body that breeds and on pregnancy are very lucid.” – Re-Libro
“In Boulder love runs off roughly.” – Marie Claire
“Baltasar shows a great talent to narrate human feelings and reminds us, in this immense book, that vital perspectives are as fragile as a ship navigating rough seas.” – Un libro al día
“Baltasar returns with identical expressiveness and lyricism and with the construction of complex characters that address issues such as motherhood and lack of communication, so frequent in these modern times.” - Valencia Plaza
Author Biography
Eva Baltasar has published ten volumes of poetry which have received widespread recognition and numerous awards. Her debut work of fiction, Permafrost, received the 2018 Premi Llibreter (Catalan Booksellers Award) and is the first novel in a triptych which aims to explore the universes of three different women in the first person. Boulder is the second book in the tryptich, and it will be followed by Mamut in 2021.
The author lives a simple life with her two daughters in a village near the mountains.
SalmaiaLit Literary Agency
Launched in Barcelona in 2008 by Bernat Fiol SalmaiaLit represents world rights of individual authors as well as translation rights of publishers and other literary agencies.
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Club Editor
- Orginal LanguageCatalan
- ISBN/Identifier 9788473292573
- Publication Country or regionSpain
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusPublished
- Original Language TitleBoulder
- Original Language AuthorsCatalan
- Copyright Year2020
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