Eva Baltasar’s first novel, Permafrost, which was also translated into English by Julia Sanches, tells the story of a woman who finds closeness difficult, at one point (entirely falsely) telling a girlfriend who suggests marriage that there is someone else just to push her away. Her follow-up, Boulder, focuses on a single relationship, but one which also runs into problems. The narrator is a cook on merchant ship when she first meets Samsa and is instantly attracted to her:
“We spend the night together. I don’t fuck her, I whet myself on her.”
Already we can see where Baltasar’s power as a writer lies – and perhaps guess that she was a published poet ten years before her first novel. The image of ‘whetting’ herself against the women she has fallen for, sharpening her desire, is one John Donne would be proud of. Her longing only increases when the boat leaves and only returns three months later. Samsa names the narrator Boulder, telling her she’s “like those large solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of the world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element.” It is an unheeded warning (particularly when combined with the book’s Carson McCullers epigraph, “Love is a solitary thing.”) Their relationship becomes more intense, matching Baltasar’s fearless descriptions of sex, until Samsa tells the narrator she is leaving for a job in Reykjavik.
Rather than ending the relationships, this creates a new beginning as they travel to Iceland together. Their relationship takes on a more domestic flavour, particularly at first when the narrator is not working. They buy a house, though it is clear that their new way of life is more suited to Samsa than her lover who feels, “Quaint little houses like hers eat away at you.”
“Sometimes I have the feeling they all come equipped with a full retinue of ghosts itching to haunt you into an early grave.”
Yet her love remains unquestioned: “I feel stronger with Samsa’s body underneath mine, like she is my foundation.” Time passes; the narrator sets up a food truck business, her desire to keep this separate from Samsa (“to keep her away from this thing that’s all my own”) highlighting her earlier need for isolation. Baltasar moves the narrative forward at will – at this point five years are brushed aside in a sentence. The paragraphs focus instead on deeply felt moments, into which the reader can be dropped in a disorienting fashion. In this fashion, the idea of having a child appears suddenly, exactly as it feels to the narrator:
“It comes out of nowhere with such extraordinary force it razes everything to the ground, like an earthquake.”
While this idea follows the narrator “like a sinner harassing another sinner,” it has the opposite effect on Samsa:
“She seems to generate a light whose source is the same active, powerful nucleus that glows inside a squid.”
Once again, it is the language the author uses to describe her character’s feelings that is striking – it conveys the change in Samsa, while at the same time containing both the idea of pregnancy and the narrator’s disgust. She is now torn between her love for Samsa and her loathing of the further domesticity that Samsa’s dream entails. While Samsa goes to pregnancy classes “as if it were a religious event,” the narrator feels, “You either need a hangover or an active imagination to be able to appreciate them.” Of course, their sex life suffers:
“Samsa is sexless, a dockyard gridlocked by a single ship.”
The story may not be original – they are not the first couple to feel unequally about having a child – but Baltasar’s ability to describe the physicality of emotional states raises it above the ordinary. She captures the narrator’s feelings with an intimacy and accuracy that assaults the reader at times, where even cliches such as affairs seem freshly seen. Boulder deserves its place on the International Booker longlist for the power of its language alone and, despite its brevity, may even make the shortlist.
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