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.”
