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Tríptic #2
Boulder
[English-language summary below]
La protagonista d'aquesta novel·la és una dona atreta per la solitud com per un imant. Es guanya la vida en un buc, la situació perfecta: una cabina, l'oceà, moltes hores per encara el buit i algún port per conèixer dones. Fins que una la reté, se l'emporta entre les quatre parets d'una casa i l'embarca en la gestació assistida d'una criatura. ¿Què en farà, la maternitat, de l'amant coneguda en un bar?
Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname “Boulder.” When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already 40 and can’t bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn’t know how to say no―and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien.
With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love.
Once again, Eva Baltasar demonstrates her preeminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world―and in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga.
La protagonista d'aquesta novel·la és una dona atreta per la solitud com per un imant. Es guanya la vida en un buc, la situació perfecta: una cabina, l'oceà, moltes hores per encara el buit i algún port per conèixer dones. Fins que una la reté, se l'emporta entre les quatre parets d'una casa i l'embarca en la gestació assistida d'una criatura. ¿Què en farà, la maternitat, de l'amant coneguda en un bar?
Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname “Boulder.” When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already 40 and can’t bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn’t know how to say no―and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien.
With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love.
Once again, Eva Baltasar demonstrates her preeminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world―and in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga.
128 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 2020
About the author
Eva Baltasar
19 books644 followersEva Baltasar is a Catalan poet and writer. She has a bachelor's degree in Pedagogy from the University of Barcelona. She has published ten books of poetry, which have earned numerous awards including the 2008 Miquel de Palol, the 2010 Benet Ribas, and the 2015 Gabriel Ferrater. Permafrost was her first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,694 reviews
January 26, 2024
New favourite alert!!!! Eva Batltasar a master of metaphors, a sensei of similes!!!!!! One of the easiest 5 star reviews I've ever given. Every line is a masterpiece.
Our central protagonist works as kitchen staff on a boat and, upon temporarily disembarking, has a passionate love affair with a woman working on the shore. They promise to wait for each other and when they reunite 3 months later, the woman reveals she is moving to Iceland. Our narrator (nicknamed "Boulder") uproots her life for this woman she desperately yearns for and moves across borders with her. Once they arrive in Reykjavik, her partner declares that she wants a child, much to Boulder's horror. Reluctantly agreeing despite not sharing this desire, she finds her partner unrecognisable in motherhood, and struggles to cope in her new circumstances so far away from home.
Conflicted by equally intense desires for love and freedom, the book becomes an introspective, enthralling narrative about intimacy, (mis)communication, motherhood, and autonomy. Intricately crafted, not a word is wasted.
5 stars, I didn't want it to end ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Our central protagonist works as kitchen staff on a boat and, upon temporarily disembarking, has a passionate love affair with a woman working on the shore. They promise to wait for each other and when they reunite 3 months later, the woman reveals she is moving to Iceland. Our narrator (nicknamed "Boulder") uproots her life for this woman she desperately yearns for and moves across borders with her. Once they arrive in Reykjavik, her partner declares that she wants a child, much to Boulder's horror. Reluctantly agreeing despite not sharing this desire, she finds her partner unrecognisable in motherhood, and struggles to cope in her new circumstances so far away from home.
Conflicted by equally intense desires for love and freedom, the book becomes an introspective, enthralling narrative about intimacy, (mis)communication, motherhood, and autonomy. Intricately crafted, not a word is wasted.
5 stars, I didn't want it to end ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
September 30, 2024
‘Time has set its sights on us and slowly worn us down, sharpening its teeth on our bodies.’
WOW EVA BALTASAR CAN WRITE! Whew, sorry, just had to scream it because I’ve just finished Boulder and -- THE PROSE IS LIKE THE MOON AND ALL THE COSMOS REFLECTING OFF A PRISTINE SEA IN SUMMER --- uh, sorry, I promise I’ll keep it together here, Boulder is a scathingly dark and comic look at adulthood and the stages of romantic coupling told from a narrator who is pulled through it kicking and screaming as if she had been bound and dragged across the gravel of life. In a PEN award winning translation by Julia Sanches -- IT WILL GNASH YOU UP IN ITS PERFECT POETIC JAWS, RAZE YOU WITH METAPHORS, SEAR YOU TO THE BONES WITH MENACING BEAUTY THEN DANCE UPON YOUR ASHES AS YOU SAY ‘THANK YOU EVA MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?!’ -- erm, got carried away again… Anyways, Boulder is Baltasar’s second in a triptych (though a completely independent narrative) on queer women’s lives and expression, following the brilliant and gallows-humorous novel Permafrost, this time exploring the complexities of motherhood and how it tips the scales between roles of mother and lover. Our narrator follows desire from her quiet solitude both literally and figuratively adrift on the ocean into a landlocked relationship where ‘the strength of family ties’ becomes a slow suffocation kindling an urge for escape in this slim but sensuously sharp and shattering novella.
‘I can give anything up,’ the narrator tells us at the start of the novella, ‘because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.’ She goes from job to job winding up a cook aboard a merchant ship, happy in her singularity besides an occasional lover at the various ports around Chile. Until she meets Samsa, a Scandinavian woman with whom ‘satisfying her is like settling a blood debt,’ and when a new job for Samsa would separate them forever, she follows into a domestic life in Reykjavik. However, is it anchoring to love or merely blown about on the tides of desire? ‘No emotion is more indulgent than feeling that you are intensely human,’ she thinks, ‘though it can also be the most tyrannical,’ and it is precisely her whims and ‘humanness’ that makes her such an engaging and lively character.
‘The truth is we’d never made any plans, we’d just taken huge bites out of life.’
What proceeds is the culminations of ‘fucking milestones’ in any long-term couple, and Boulder resenting them all.They go from buying a house—’single-faily homes have ravenous souls that feed off of your own little human soul—sucking dry your freedom, your independence, and all trace of your passion’—entertaining guests (Boulder hates parties) and eventually to Samsa wanting a child before she can no longer have one. ‘She thinks of me as a challenge and believes she can train me the way a farmer would train a wolf—it drives me up the fucking wall,’ admits Boulder, though the desire keeps her rooted with one eye always on the door, even if that door is merely a job in her food truck and drinking with her only friend, Ragnar, at the bar.
For a character that values freedom, can the confines of a relationship hold them there without inciting resentment? And for a character centered on their own desires, will they be able to shift from sitting upon the throne of their own kingdom to being in servitude to another?
The novel is comically pessimistic, bleakly even, but the prose keeps it feeling effervescent at all times. Baltasar’s prose is so impressive and consistently hearty, feeling like an angry punk friend raging against all that they hate, but in a way that never feels like self-loathing and woe-is-me but rather just righteous disdain. The rants take surprising turns into beautifully dark metaphors and figurative language (which is primarily crafted with images of geology and waves) that really dances in the brain. Take, for instance, Boulder’s impressions on a child entering into a family:
Baltasar keeps the narrative at a distance from the events, told in sweeping generalizations of large swaths of time through Boulder’s reflections upon them. There are few characters (even fewer with names) emphasizing her feelings of isolation and there is basically no dialogue—just summaries of conversations/arguments and entirely framed by Boulder—furthering the characterization of her as wanting control over her own life. The irony is, however, that her sense of control is also dominated by the agency of desires. ‘The fact that I’m acting on impulse doesn’t make me guilty, it makes me human,’ she writes, and one thing that can be said about Boulder is that she owns her own flaws as well as strengths and is unapologetically who she is. The trouble, it seems, is when she must compromise on who she is, doing so out of love but feeling the ‘self’ withering in the process.
‘I don't tell her that what I want is to not be a mother.’
Despite resisting Samsa’s idea to become pregnant, the journey leads us to tiny newborn Tinna. This also changes the couple’s dynamic, as the role of lover concedes ground to the role of motherhood. Boulder compares Samsa, now no longer sleeping with her and withdrawing by the day—like a ‘dockyard gridlocked by a single ship’)—to someone who has found religion, ‘her motherhood is just that, a tiered system of values that aspires to encompass and clarify everything,’ and examines how a value shift alters an entire relationship.
For someone who chased desire and freedom, being rooted by responsibility is destabilizing and threatening. It is a feeling I suspect any couple must inevitably grapple with, and perhaps the humor of the ravaging hatred for it all here is a sort of escape, a dark pleasure to assuage one’s own worries of commitment. Not that Boulder dislikes Tinna, and it is moving watching Boulder embrace motherhood (even if it becomes a battle against Samsa).
‘Language is and always will be an occupied territory.’
Perhaps the aspect I love about Baltasar so much is not only is the language beautiful but they are also an investigation of lived experience constantly aware as experienced through language. ‘She uncovers with language,’ we read, Boulder and Samsa are ‘loaning each other language,’ by learning each other’s native language and, as Boulder tells us ‘language stakes us when we are born and shapes us, governs our cells…builds us as people and sometimes we are not aware of it.’ This is an extension on the narrative style of being so enclosed in Boulder’s perspective on events as it allows her to shape herself through her language of telling as well as shape the events in a way that she can process them. It is a reclaiming of self after having been reshaped externally, most notably by her relationship with Tinna:
The idea of words growing over you, reclaiming you into the wild of language, is a beautiful thought and Baltasar has a mastery of prose that makes it come alive. It is no surprise to learn she is a well-regarded poet.
Boulder is a piercing look at the roles we play and the way they (re)shape our lives in proximity to each other and ourselves. Dark yet humorous, this is a rebellion against the bondage of adulthood and a primal scream for independence that reverberates inside the reader with such eloquent prose it is unbelievable. It is also an extremely sensual novel and while I tend to find literary writers to be rather offputting with sex scenes, Baltasar makes them an erotic romp of poetry. This book is hot when it wants to be. Honestly, I’ll read anything Baltasar writes, and this is a lovely follow-up to Permafrost. I cannot wait for the third book, but please enjoy this one until then.
4.5/5
WOW EVA BALTASAR CAN WRITE! Whew, sorry, just had to scream it because I’ve just finished Boulder and -- THE PROSE IS LIKE THE MOON AND ALL THE COSMOS REFLECTING OFF A PRISTINE SEA IN SUMMER --- uh, sorry, I promise I’ll keep it together here, Boulder is a scathingly dark and comic look at adulthood and the stages of romantic coupling told from a narrator who is pulled through it kicking and screaming as if she had been bound and dragged across the gravel of life. In a PEN award winning translation by Julia Sanches -- IT WILL GNASH YOU UP IN ITS PERFECT POETIC JAWS, RAZE YOU WITH METAPHORS, SEAR YOU TO THE BONES WITH MENACING BEAUTY THEN DANCE UPON YOUR ASHES AS YOU SAY ‘THANK YOU EVA MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?!’ -- erm, got carried away again… Anyways, Boulder is Baltasar’s second in a triptych (though a completely independent narrative) on queer women’s lives and expression, following the brilliant and gallows-humorous novel Permafrost, this time exploring the complexities of motherhood and how it tips the scales between roles of mother and lover. Our narrator follows desire from her quiet solitude both literally and figuratively adrift on the ocean into a landlocked relationship where ‘the strength of family ties’ becomes a slow suffocation kindling an urge for escape in this slim but sensuously sharp and shattering novella.
‘I can give anything up,’ the narrator tells us at the start of the novella, ‘because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.’ She goes from job to job winding up a cook aboard a merchant ship, happy in her singularity besides an occasional lover at the various ports around Chile. Until she meets Samsa, a Scandinavian woman with whom ‘satisfying her is like settling a blood debt,’ and when a new job for Samsa would separate them forever, she follows into a domestic life in Reykjavik. However, is it anchoring to love or merely blown about on the tides of desire? ‘No emotion is more indulgent than feeling that you are intensely human,’ she thinks, ‘though it can also be the most tyrannical,’ and it is precisely her whims and ‘humanness’ that makes her such an engaging and lively character.
‘The truth is we’d never made any plans, we’d just taken huge bites out of life.’
What proceeds is the culminations of ‘fucking milestones’ in any long-term couple, and Boulder resenting them all.They go from buying a house—’single-faily homes have ravenous souls that feed off of your own little human soul—sucking dry your freedom, your independence, and all trace of your passion’—entertaining guests (Boulder hates parties) and eventually to Samsa wanting a child before she can no longer have one. ‘She thinks of me as a challenge and believes she can train me the way a farmer would train a wolf—it drives me up the fucking wall,’ admits Boulder, though the desire keeps her rooted with one eye always on the door, even if that door is merely a job in her food truck and drinking with her only friend, Ragnar, at the bar.
‘The short term can tether you to the world of senses—the hazardous, inexact border that cuts through the forest…Its greatest virtue is that it keeps you on your toes. At the same time they removed me from my chosen life. Eight years with Samsa and every millimeter of land has been charted. All of it. How can existence exhaust itself? I contemplate disappearing.’
For a character that values freedom, can the confines of a relationship hold them there without inciting resentment? And for a character centered on their own desires, will they be able to shift from sitting upon the throne of their own kingdom to being in servitude to another?
The novel is comically pessimistic, bleakly even, but the prose keeps it feeling effervescent at all times. Baltasar’s prose is so impressive and consistently hearty, feeling like an angry punk friend raging against all that they hate, but in a way that never feels like self-loathing and woe-is-me but rather just righteous disdain. The rants take surprising turns into beautifully dark metaphors and figurative language (which is primarily crafted with images of geology and waves) that really dances in the brain. Take, for instance, Boulder’s impressions on a child entering into a family:
‘Having a kid is an enormous undertaking. It kicks into gear right away, without any warning. It comes out of nowhere with such extraordinary force that it razes everything to the ground, like an earthquake…It seems unbelievable that a single decision, a fucking intangible thought, could so violently upset the flesh-and-bone scaffolding of daily life, the steady rhythm of the hours, the predictable, material color of the landscapes that give us nourishment and company…Its presence has dimension; it occupies the house with concrete tentacles, sinks into the skulls of the people who live there, and clings to the fine membrane that sheathes their gray matter. I can't get away, it follows me wherever I go like a sinner harassing another sinner, stoning him and hissing all of his fears into his ear.’
Baltasar keeps the narrative at a distance from the events, told in sweeping generalizations of large swaths of time through Boulder’s reflections upon them. There are few characters (even fewer with names) emphasizing her feelings of isolation and there is basically no dialogue—just summaries of conversations/arguments and entirely framed by Boulder—furthering the characterization of her as wanting control over her own life. The irony is, however, that her sense of control is also dominated by the agency of desires. ‘The fact that I’m acting on impulse doesn’t make me guilty, it makes me human,’ she writes, and one thing that can be said about Boulder is that she owns her own flaws as well as strengths and is unapologetically who she is. The trouble, it seems, is when she must compromise on who she is, doing so out of love but feeling the ‘self’ withering in the process.
‘I don't tell her that what I want is to not be a mother.’
Despite resisting Samsa’s idea to become pregnant, the journey leads us to tiny newborn Tinna. This also changes the couple’s dynamic, as the role of lover concedes ground to the role of motherhood. Boulder compares Samsa, now no longer sleeping with her and withdrawing by the day—like a ‘dockyard gridlocked by a single ship’)—to someone who has found religion, ‘her motherhood is just that, a tiered system of values that aspires to encompass and clarify everything,’ and examines how a value shift alters an entire relationship.
‘I feel like an elderly mafioso, like Samsa belongs to me not out of the love we have for one another but out of a new, shared responsibility, because I am in a position to accommodate an improbable, difficult whim.’
For someone who chased desire and freedom, being rooted by responsibility is destabilizing and threatening. It is a feeling I suspect any couple must inevitably grapple with, and perhaps the humor of the ravaging hatred for it all here is a sort of escape, a dark pleasure to assuage one’s own worries of commitment. Not that Boulder dislikes Tinna, and it is moving watching Boulder embrace motherhood (even if it becomes a battle against Samsa).
‘Language is and always will be an occupied territory.’
Perhaps the aspect I love about Baltasar so much is not only is the language beautiful but they are also an investigation of lived experience constantly aware as experienced through language. ‘She uncovers with language,’ we read, Boulder and Samsa are ‘loaning each other language,’ by learning each other’s native language and, as Boulder tells us ‘language stakes us when we are born and shapes us, governs our cells…builds us as people and sometimes we are not aware of it.’ This is an extension on the narrative style of being so enclosed in Boulder’s perspective on events as it allows her to shape herself through her language of telling as well as shape the events in a way that she can process them. It is a reclaiming of self after having been reshaped externally, most notably by her relationship with Tinna:
‘Holding Tinna like this makes me feel strange and new. It makes me think of all the words that have grown over me like hedges or weeds. Among them, one that's harder and older than any other in the world: mother.’
The idea of words growing over you, reclaiming you into the wild of language, is a beautiful thought and Baltasar has a mastery of prose that makes it come alive. It is no surprise to learn she is a well-regarded poet.
Boulder is a piercing look at the roles we play and the way they (re)shape our lives in proximity to each other and ourselves. Dark yet humorous, this is a rebellion against the bondage of adulthood and a primal scream for independence that reverberates inside the reader with such eloquent prose it is unbelievable. It is also an extremely sensual novel and while I tend to find literary writers to be rather offputting with sex scenes, Baltasar makes them an erotic romp of poetry. This book is hot when it wants to be. Honestly, I’ll read anything Baltasar writes, and this is a lovely follow-up to Permafrost. I cannot wait for the third book, but please enjoy this one until then.
4.5/5
April 18, 2023
Yey! Now shortlisted for Booker Prize International 2023
Finally a International Booker longlisted novel that excited me. I thought this day will not come this year.
Boulder is a short, visceral, powerful, poetic novel about Love between two women and the impact motherhood has on their relationship. As I read somewhere else, there is nothing new in this book but I also did not read anything quite like it.
Boulder is part of triptych in which the author presents the life of three queer women in 1 st person. The main character, Boulder, as she is nicknamed, is independent, seeks love and sex and is reluctant to keep a job for long or to work in a team. One day on the Chilean shores, she meets a young blond Icelandic woman, Samsa, and her life changes. In love, they move to Reyjkavic where they share a small one-room apartment. After years of cohabitation, Samsa decides she want to become a mother and convinces reluctant Boulder to come along for the ride.
Even from the beginning of the novel Boulder has a clear opinion about children: “I’m not into kids. I find them annoying. They’re unpredictable variables that come crashing into my coastal shelf with the gale force of their natural madness. They’re craggy, out of control, scattered. They’re drawn to me the same way cats zero in on people who are allergic to them.”
Dragged along on a journey she is not willing to embark on but incapable to say no out of devotion for the woman she loves, Boulder comes an distant and sharp observer of the transformation in her lover during the fertilisation, pregnancy and motherhood. “A visibly pregnant woman is like an ancient witch; she guards the secret to life, and this makes her more than human, nearly semidivine. Her energetic body is an enormous mouth that speaks on her behalf, regardless of whether anyone is listening. But a newly pregnant woman, a woman in her first trimester … Now she’s a hand grenade, a ticking bomb that sleeps beside you. Her uterus is the sensor that holds the diamond, it’s a reactor, it contains the Big Bang, a surplus of neutrons and nitroglycerin. The smallest disturbance can set it off”
“The love she feels for Tinna is both loose and binding; she lives it as if it were prewritten and obeys it as if it were the stuff of legend. To me it’s more like a parasite that has usurped her and now rides her in victory. I wonder where it is mothers go, once they stop following the rules. Samsa goes to Wednesdays (the day Samsa is free to do what she wants). They are the public squares where she asserts her independence. She devours every Wednesday hour because every other hour of every other day is like a vampire that wants her with a love that bleeds her dry.”
As you can see, the writing is savage, dark but also it can be poetic and sensuous. I was blown away by it. I read books about motherhood (Still Born is one of them) but none from the perspective of two women. It was refreshing.
Finally a International Booker longlisted novel that excited me. I thought this day will not come this year.
Boulder is a short, visceral, powerful, poetic novel about Love between two women and the impact motherhood has on their relationship. As I read somewhere else, there is nothing new in this book but I also did not read anything quite like it.
Boulder is part of triptych in which the author presents the life of three queer women in 1 st person. The main character, Boulder, as she is nicknamed, is independent, seeks love and sex and is reluctant to keep a job for long or to work in a team. One day on the Chilean shores, she meets a young blond Icelandic woman, Samsa, and her life changes. In love, they move to Reyjkavic where they share a small one-room apartment. After years of cohabitation, Samsa decides she want to become a mother and convinces reluctant Boulder to come along for the ride.
Even from the beginning of the novel Boulder has a clear opinion about children: “I’m not into kids. I find them annoying. They’re unpredictable variables that come crashing into my coastal shelf with the gale force of their natural madness. They’re craggy, out of control, scattered. They’re drawn to me the same way cats zero in on people who are allergic to them.”
Dragged along on a journey she is not willing to embark on but incapable to say no out of devotion for the woman she loves, Boulder comes an distant and sharp observer of the transformation in her lover during the fertilisation, pregnancy and motherhood. “A visibly pregnant woman is like an ancient witch; she guards the secret to life, and this makes her more than human, nearly semidivine. Her energetic body is an enormous mouth that speaks on her behalf, regardless of whether anyone is listening. But a newly pregnant woman, a woman in her first trimester … Now she’s a hand grenade, a ticking bomb that sleeps beside you. Her uterus is the sensor that holds the diamond, it’s a reactor, it contains the Big Bang, a surplus of neutrons and nitroglycerin. The smallest disturbance can set it off”
“The love she feels for Tinna is both loose and binding; she lives it as if it were prewritten and obeys it as if it were the stuff of legend. To me it’s more like a parasite that has usurped her and now rides her in victory. I wonder where it is mothers go, once they stop following the rules. Samsa goes to Wednesdays (the day Samsa is free to do what she wants). They are the public squares where she asserts her independence. She devours every Wednesday hour because every other hour of every other day is like a vampire that wants her with a love that bleeds her dry.”
As you can see, the writing is savage, dark but also it can be poetic and sensuous. I was blown away by it. I read books about motherhood (Still Born is one of them) but none from the perspective of two women. It was refreshing.
September 8, 2024
Boulder, the name suggests something bold, large like a rock, impenetrable at the outset but gets smoothen with erosion . The book starts with an explosion as you are taken aback with the bombardments of razor-sharp literary bullets. You find yourself in the midst of a sweltering sea of turbulent waters which doesn’t settle throughout the story. Amongst the sea of turbulent emotions, we find a strong, independent, horny, chain-smoking cook working on a merchant ship off the coast of southern Chile- Boulder. The entire existence of the narrator- Boulder- strives for the fabulous freedom wherein she does not owe any explanations to anyone, to live among eyes which neither desire her nor rejects her, just let her be herself amidst her zone of absolute ‘true-zero’.
source
The process of reading of a book generally takes it course through it gradually getting under skin of the reader after overcoming the reader’s initial phase of apprehension but Boulder starts with explosion, straightway blowing the readers and their minds without any superfluousness as if it rides over a sense of utmost urgency on to a quest for the ultimate truth. The narrator of the story pulls in the reader, dwindling over the tumultuous and violent waves of the sea of emotions, to the vortex of the sea wherein the heart of matter may lie, without wasting many words. Boulder takes the reader on a hot and stormy ride of sex, passion, desires and lust to sacred emotion of love, wherein we meet Samsa, whom she loves passionately so much so that she moves to her place of strange and unfamiliar surroundings in Iceland.
What follows is the poignant struggle of Boulder to find a divine balance between the independent, free, strong-willed soul she is and her passionate love for Samsa, love pushes her outward only to meet the strong wall of solitude which always pulls her inside to be herself to embrace that fabulous freedom wherein no one can touch her soul. However, the humanly desire for Samsa who is one and whole like a god, gives in her freedom to assuage her wild and chaotic heart through the ardour of love. Her love compels and coerces her to accede to the unexpected motherhood brought in by the incessant desire of her lover. The things they used to love to do with each other, do not seem to bother them, and in fact, stretch away the fabric of relationship so much so that they become invisible to each other. Boulder becomes a troubled soul whose emotional wounds rots and seethe over the sea of turbulence, the flower which bloomed with life withered away as dry petals of anguish and pain.
The book is like a prose poem wherein the narrative comprises of short poetic ruminations as if the narrator has drunk life through soul, and throbbing & pulsating soul of her is now crying of life through these outbursts. The narrator is brutal and ruthless but honest with no veneer of morality to be socially acceptable. She is like a free wind which gusts over the untamed sea of human desires and passions. But the hurricane comes halt on encounter with motherhood and grapples to comprehend & accept it. While Samsa is completely at home with motherhood, Boulder feels as if it throws her away from her life of love, passions, and desires which she carefully has carved out through her independent and free will.
The emptiness of solitude fills her life as if her existence takes dive in the hell of nothingness, she looks for solace in the company of other casual hook-ups, but nothing brings consolation to her soul. However, their daughter-Tinna stimulates a new sense of intimacy in her Boulder, intimacy which is strange and afresh, as if the flower may bloom again on the anew feeling of love and affection. Boulder finds herself amidst the soup of her fire of independence and the newly felt feeling of endearment, she has to churn the froth with her soul to decide the fate of her life.
source
What transpires here is a complex, poetic but tenacious and turbulent depiction of the most revered human relationship and how does it cope up with motherhood. It is a poignant journey to the dark corners of humanity wherein we see a fierce and savage struggle between the desire to be loved and basic human inclination to be free and independent. The author writes with such a control and command that the entire book appears to be long tragic poem which dances on your consciousness to keep you on your toes through the end.
source
The process of reading of a book generally takes it course through it gradually getting under skin of the reader after overcoming the reader’s initial phase of apprehension but Boulder starts with explosion, straightway blowing the readers and their minds without any superfluousness as if it rides over a sense of utmost urgency on to a quest for the ultimate truth. The narrator of the story pulls in the reader, dwindling over the tumultuous and violent waves of the sea of emotions, to the vortex of the sea wherein the heart of matter may lie, without wasting many words. Boulder takes the reader on a hot and stormy ride of sex, passion, desires and lust to sacred emotion of love, wherein we meet Samsa, whom she loves passionately so much so that she moves to her place of strange and unfamiliar surroundings in Iceland.
What follows is the poignant struggle of Boulder to find a divine balance between the independent, free, strong-willed soul she is and her passionate love for Samsa, love pushes her outward only to meet the strong wall of solitude which always pulls her inside to be herself to embrace that fabulous freedom wherein no one can touch her soul. However, the humanly desire for Samsa who is one and whole like a god, gives in her freedom to assuage her wild and chaotic heart through the ardour of love. Her love compels and coerces her to accede to the unexpected motherhood brought in by the incessant desire of her lover. The things they used to love to do with each other, do not seem to bother them, and in fact, stretch away the fabric of relationship so much so that they become invisible to each other. Boulder becomes a troubled soul whose emotional wounds rots and seethe over the sea of turbulence, the flower which bloomed with life withered away as dry petals of anguish and pain.
The book is like a prose poem wherein the narrative comprises of short poetic ruminations as if the narrator has drunk life through soul, and throbbing & pulsating soul of her is now crying of life through these outbursts. The narrator is brutal and ruthless but honest with no veneer of morality to be socially acceptable. She is like a free wind which gusts over the untamed sea of human desires and passions. But the hurricane comes halt on encounter with motherhood and grapples to comprehend & accept it. While Samsa is completely at home with motherhood, Boulder feels as if it throws her away from her life of love, passions, and desires which she carefully has carved out through her independent and free will.
The emptiness of solitude fills her life as if her existence takes dive in the hell of nothingness, she looks for solace in the company of other casual hook-ups, but nothing brings consolation to her soul. However, their daughter-Tinna stimulates a new sense of intimacy in her Boulder, intimacy which is strange and afresh, as if the flower may bloom again on the anew feeling of love and affection. Boulder finds herself amidst the soup of her fire of independence and the newly felt feeling of endearment, she has to churn the froth with her soul to decide the fate of her life.
source
What transpires here is a complex, poetic but tenacious and turbulent depiction of the most revered human relationship and how does it cope up with motherhood. It is a poignant journey to the dark corners of humanity wherein we see a fierce and savage struggle between the desire to be loved and basic human inclination to be free and independent. The author writes with such a control and command that the entire book appears to be long tragic poem which dances on your consciousness to keep you on your toes through the end.
April 6, 2023
Boulder is Julia Sanches's outstanding translation of Eva Baltasar's novella of the same name. This is the second work in Baltasar's triptych, following Permafrost (Permagel), which was also translated by Sanches and published by And Other Stories. Calling these works part of a triptych, rather than a trilogy, makes sense: both are riveting first-person accounts narrated by queer female characters, although the characters and settings are quite different. One need not follow the other. Boulder is a slimmer work, a testament to what can be accomplished in little more than 100 pages, narrated by the eponymous character (Boulder being a nickname). On one level, Boulder explores motherhood in the context of a same-sex relationship, centering the narrative on a partner who is less keen on the notion of introducing children into the equation. But on a deeper level, I read this as a character study of a queer woman adrift, the couple's decision to have a child in part a result of Boulder's failure to articulate her own desires. We see a character who is emotionally vulnerable yet guarded, Baltasar and Sanches doing excellent work to provide access to that for readers. The third work in the triptych - Mamut - is already out in Catalan and should make its way into English soon.
April 18, 2023
Now shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker
This is a story which I've read before, many times; and it's simultaneously a story which I've never read before. A couple in love, bonded physically, come apart when one of them wants - needs - to have a baby, and the other partner goes along with it because she recognises Samsa's desire to be a mother. Cue fertility treatments, artificial insemination, pregnancy, childbirth, alienation and infidelity.
But what makes this feel so radically fresh is that the unnamed narrator, nicknamed Boulder by her lover ('she says that I'm like those large, solitary rocks... no one knows where they came from'), who has no maternal urges at all, who wants love and freedom, independence and unfettered space, is also female. And it's this widening out of women's roles in literature that made this book such compulsive reading for me.
Eschewing the traditional schema of gendered roles being biologically hard-wired, of reluctance to settle being textually gendered masculine, Baltasar presents us with a story where both positions are occupied by women: the ex-career girl turned earth-mother who sacrifices herself willingly to motherhood and the perpetual wanderer who sees no need to be anything beyond herself, who builds a tentative relationship with her daughter but who refuses to be defined by cultural maternal constructions that are meaningless to her.
I have to say that on a sentence level, I was frequently irritated by the over-writing, especially in terms of similes and metaphors: the cold 'thrashing and bucking under my skin, and also deeper inside, in the arches between each organ'; the absurdity of dough left to rise overnight being likened to 'a distant nephew who's grown up, effortlessly'; a body that experiences no sexual desire as 'a dockyard gridlocked by a single ship'.
But the power of the narrative supersedes these local infelicities. This is short but productively claustrophobic as we are held tightly in Boulder's head and her refreshing rejections of conventional emotions, even when she can't speak them aloud: 'I don't tell her that what I want is to not be a mother' (and note that active phraseology of 'I want' rather than 'I don't want').
Challenging? Possibly. But how refreshing to find a book which deals with those big topics of love, sex, commitment, freedom, motherhood, social and cultural roles, from multiple female perspectives with barely a male character in sight.
Thanks to And Other Stories for an ARC via Edelweiss.
This is a story which I've read before, many times; and it's simultaneously a story which I've never read before. A couple in love, bonded physically, come apart when one of them wants - needs - to have a baby, and the other partner goes along with it because she recognises Samsa's desire to be a mother. Cue fertility treatments, artificial insemination, pregnancy, childbirth, alienation and infidelity.
But what makes this feel so radically fresh is that the unnamed narrator, nicknamed Boulder by her lover ('she says that I'm like those large, solitary rocks... no one knows where they came from'), who has no maternal urges at all, who wants love and freedom, independence and unfettered space, is also female. And it's this widening out of women's roles in literature that made this book such compulsive reading for me.
Eschewing the traditional schema of gendered roles being biologically hard-wired, of reluctance to settle being textually gendered masculine, Baltasar presents us with a story where both positions are occupied by women: the ex-career girl turned earth-mother who sacrifices herself willingly to motherhood and the perpetual wanderer who sees no need to be anything beyond herself, who builds a tentative relationship with her daughter but who refuses to be defined by cultural maternal constructions that are meaningless to her.
I have to say that on a sentence level, I was frequently irritated by the over-writing, especially in terms of similes and metaphors: the cold 'thrashing and bucking under my skin, and also deeper inside, in the arches between each organ'; the absurdity of dough left to rise overnight being likened to 'a distant nephew who's grown up, effortlessly'; a body that experiences no sexual desire as 'a dockyard gridlocked by a single ship'.
But the power of the narrative supersedes these local infelicities. This is short but productively claustrophobic as we are held tightly in Boulder's head and her refreshing rejections of conventional emotions, even when she can't speak them aloud: 'I don't tell her that what I want is to not be a mother' (and note that active phraseology of 'I want' rather than 'I don't want').
Challenging? Possibly. But how refreshing to find a book which deals with those big topics of love, sex, commitment, freedom, motherhood, social and cultural roles, from multiple female perspectives with barely a male character in sight.
Thanks to And Other Stories for an ARC via Edelweiss.
September 18, 2022
¿Qué demonios busco cuando leo? Pues que me muevan esos hilos transparentes que no reconozco, y que necesito que sean agitados. La palabra en manos Baltasar es una arma, una flor, un guiño, una belleza.
May 23, 2023
4.5⭐️
*Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023*
“Life develops without overwhelming me, it squeezes into every minute, it implodes; I hold it in my hands. I can give anything up, because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.”
We meet our unnamed protagonist, loner content with moving from job to job, while she waits for a merchant freighter on the Chilean coast where she takes up the job as a cook, perfectly happy with the monotonous, predictable routine while traversing the South American coast. When she meets Samsa, a Scandinavian geologist, she trades in her itinerant lifestyle for a relatively more domestic arrangement in Reykjavik where Samsa gets a job.
“She doesn’t like my name, and gives me a new one. She says I’m like those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element. No one knows where they came from. Not even they understand how they’re still standing and why they never break down.”
As the years progress, “Boulder” as Samsa calls her sees herself making compromises, adjusting to life as a couple, some aspects of it more challenging than others- but prioritizing her relationship with Samsa over all she misses from her solitary life. However, the dynamic in their relationship begins to shift when Samsa expresses her desire to have a child, to have a family – a desire that Boulder does not share and a journey that Boulder is more than reluctant to embark upon. With the birth of their child, the gap between them – both in terms of physical intimacy and emotional connection - begins to broaden. Samsa’s devotion to their daughter Tinna leaves our narrator feeling lost, lonely and “in exile”. We follow Boulder as she deals with conflicting feelings of emptiness, her desire for physical connection, moments of fondness for their daughter and her need for the solitary life she has left behind.
“No emotion is more indulgent than feeling that you are intensely human. Though it can also be the most tyrannical. You are responsible for every word, and no statement is innocent.”
Boulder by Eva Baltasar (translated by Julia Sanches) is a brutally honest, unflinching yet insightful novella that takes us deep into not only the complexities of relationships – the changing dynamics, the power play- but also how we evolve as individuals in the course of the same. Narrated in the first person, and at barely one hundred pages, this is a heavy read one that will raise some important questions on how we perceive relationships, motherhood and commitment and the lengths we go to preserve those relationships we hold dear and the extent to which we are willing to lose ourselves in the interest of the same. I could not put this down. Boulder is passionate, intense and real, too real at times. You can feel the pressure building from the very first page. The author’s writing is powerful and able to convey our narrator’s suffocation and claustrophobia with skill and much emotional depth. Even though it might be difficult to sympathize with our protagonist all the while, the author allows us to understand her. It is commendable that not only does the author not resort to stereotypes but, in fact, shatters quite a few!
“Time doesn’t live outside us; it comes into being as we do. To be able to hold time in our hands— now that’s a human mission.”
I’m eager to read the remaining books in the author’s triptych. This is the second book, but all of them can be read as standalone.
*Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023*
“Life develops without overwhelming me, it squeezes into every minute, it implodes; I hold it in my hands. I can give anything up, because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.”
We meet our unnamed protagonist, loner content with moving from job to job, while she waits for a merchant freighter on the Chilean coast where she takes up the job as a cook, perfectly happy with the monotonous, predictable routine while traversing the South American coast. When she meets Samsa, a Scandinavian geologist, she trades in her itinerant lifestyle for a relatively more domestic arrangement in Reykjavik where Samsa gets a job.
“She doesn’t like my name, and gives me a new one. She says I’m like those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element. No one knows where they came from. Not even they understand how they’re still standing and why they never break down.”
As the years progress, “Boulder” as Samsa calls her sees herself making compromises, adjusting to life as a couple, some aspects of it more challenging than others- but prioritizing her relationship with Samsa over all she misses from her solitary life. However, the dynamic in their relationship begins to shift when Samsa expresses her desire to have a child, to have a family – a desire that Boulder does not share and a journey that Boulder is more than reluctant to embark upon. With the birth of their child, the gap between them – both in terms of physical intimacy and emotional connection - begins to broaden. Samsa’s devotion to their daughter Tinna leaves our narrator feeling lost, lonely and “in exile”. We follow Boulder as she deals with conflicting feelings of emptiness, her desire for physical connection, moments of fondness for their daughter and her need for the solitary life she has left behind.
“No emotion is more indulgent than feeling that you are intensely human. Though it can also be the most tyrannical. You are responsible for every word, and no statement is innocent.”
Boulder by Eva Baltasar (translated by Julia Sanches) is a brutally honest, unflinching yet insightful novella that takes us deep into not only the complexities of relationships – the changing dynamics, the power play- but also how we evolve as individuals in the course of the same. Narrated in the first person, and at barely one hundred pages, this is a heavy read one that will raise some important questions on how we perceive relationships, motherhood and commitment and the lengths we go to preserve those relationships we hold dear and the extent to which we are willing to lose ourselves in the interest of the same. I could not put this down. Boulder is passionate, intense and real, too real at times. You can feel the pressure building from the very first page. The author’s writing is powerful and able to convey our narrator’s suffocation and claustrophobia with skill and much emotional depth. Even though it might be difficult to sympathize with our protagonist all the while, the author allows us to understand her. It is commendable that not only does the author not resort to stereotypes but, in fact, shatters quite a few!
“Time doesn’t live outside us; it comes into being as we do. To be able to hold time in our hands— now that’s a human mission.”
I’m eager to read the remaining books in the author’s triptych. This is the second book, but all of them can be read as standalone.
Read
January 13, 2024This is one of a couple of books I didn't get a chance to review in the hurry-scurry days of December. It's a short book that I might well have forgotten, but no. In these slower-roll-out January days, Boulder is still on my mind. I've realised it's not possible to forget it.
The most unimportant thing about Boulder is the storyline—though the blurb on the back is all about the story.
The most important thing is the writing. It's like the fierce wind described on the first page—it grabs you and holds you fast. It wakes you out of any torpor you might have slipped into, and makes you tingle from head to toe. It reminds you of the transporting power of words on a page. It's kind of electric.
I wish I could have read it in the original Catalan but I feel the translator, Julia Sanches, has succeeded in making it into a real gem in English.
And the cover image by Anna Morrison is just right.
The most unimportant thing about Boulder is the storyline—though the blurb on the back is all about the story.
The most important thing is the writing. It's like the fierce wind described on the first page—it grabs you and holds you fast. It wakes you out of any torpor you might have slipped into, and makes you tingle from head to toe. It reminds you of the transporting power of words on a page. It's kind of electric.
I wish I could have read it in the original Catalan but I feel the translator, Julia Sanches, has succeeded in making it into a real gem in English.
And the cover image by Anna Morrison is just right.
April 29, 2023
Boulder is sexy, but not in the typical way. It’s not all slippery blue flame; it’s more… sharpened cleaver, swinging down before you’ve a chance to protect your vitals.
Eva Baltasar isn’t picky about what she sunders, though, so it’s not just sex…
See what I mean?
Bottom line, it’s clear from page one Baltasar knows exactly who she is as a writer and makes no bones about it. She’s out to rend, and to do it succinctly.
So, did I enjoy her novella?
I looked forward to reading it each night. But after ten or so pages, I invariably became tense and twitchy. A swinging cleaver will do that to you.
And, I have to admit, this author reminds me a great deal of a close friend, not on GR, who shall remain nameless. She’s intense and profound and exquisitely stark, and I love her for it. But after a few hours together, I’m always ready for her to go home. I can only handle so much aggressive deconstruction before I crave firelight and warmth to bring back the color. Plus, it can sometimes feel like she’s trying too hard. Pushing, for push’s sake.
Still, at novella’s end, I felt a pang. And today, I find myself missing the anticipation of charge, of aggression, of violence and beauty. This author has published ten volumes of poetry, so that’s where I’ll head next. A poem a day feels like it’ll be plenty.
3.65 ⭐️
Afterthought: Honest question… am I the only person who’s never heard of a “strapless strap on” before? This was a new discovery for me, on page 15, and when I learned how it stays in place, my little ‘ole sheltered brain sputtered two thoughts: 1. What a good idea 2. Even with lube, I’d be moderately concerned about chaffing.
Book/Song Pairing: Laid (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Cover - James )
Fucking her with a strap-on is like waking up summer and drowning it in its own swelter, it’s tossing her way up high and fighting the undertow that pulls me under before I give in to the quiet. For hours and hours (15).
Eva Baltasar isn’t picky about what she sunders, though, so it’s not just sex…
Food: “If I’ve got one skill in the kitchen, it’s carving things up. The rest is hardly an art” (6).
Land: “I’d dug into the island with my nails and learned that the pulp of your fingers can harden” (7).
Cohabitation: “Life tears open like a wound that rots and bubbles. If anyone talks to me about happiness, I swear to God I’ll break their face” (17).
Children: “I find them annoying. They’re unpredictable variables that come crashing into my coastal shelf with the gale force of their natural madness” (22).
See what I mean?
Bottom line, it’s clear from page one Baltasar knows exactly who she is as a writer and makes no bones about it. She’s out to rend, and to do it succinctly.
So, did I enjoy her novella?
I looked forward to reading it each night. But after ten or so pages, I invariably became tense and twitchy. A swinging cleaver will do that to you.
And, I have to admit, this author reminds me a great deal of a close friend, not on GR, who shall remain nameless. She’s intense and profound and exquisitely stark, and I love her for it. But after a few hours together, I’m always ready for her to go home. I can only handle so much aggressive deconstruction before I crave firelight and warmth to bring back the color. Plus, it can sometimes feel like she’s trying too hard. Pushing, for push’s sake.
Still, at novella’s end, I felt a pang. And today, I find myself missing the anticipation of charge, of aggression, of violence and beauty. This author has published ten volumes of poetry, so that’s where I’ll head next. A poem a day feels like it’ll be plenty.
3.65 ⭐️
Afterthought: Honest question… am I the only person who’s never heard of a “strapless strap on” before? This was a new discovery for me, on page 15, and when I learned how it stays in place, my little ‘ole sheltered brain sputtered two thoughts: 1. What a good idea 2. Even with lube, I’d be moderately concerned about chaffing.
Book/Song Pairing: Laid (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Cover - James )
November 5, 2023
“No emotion is more indulgent than feeling that you are intensely human...”
Amongst the silence of archipelago, beyond the reach of the elements and past rejection, the lonesome Boulder tries to find a sense of realisation. She feels adrift in searching for something, although she's not quite sure what that something is. Tired to pretend that life has a structure embarks on an exploration of self, only to find fulfilment under the charming spell of beautiful Samsa. But now Boulder must choose between freedom and conformity. Love is tested under the "threatening" eyes of motherhood, sucking-dry all trace of her passion. Boulder struggles to oppose her convictions, feeling insular and worn out, a pariah under her own skin. “Life tears open like a wound that rots and bubbles.” The days dissolve and she remains displaced and confused till the bitter end.
This is an utterly hypnotic novella from the brilliant Eva Baltasar that gave us Permafrost; and a well-deserved candidate for the International Booker Prize 2023.
Kudos also to Julia Sanches for the wonderful translation.
“Nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative…”
4.25/5
Amongst the silence of archipelago, beyond the reach of the elements and past rejection, the lonesome Boulder tries to find a sense of realisation. She feels adrift in searching for something, although she's not quite sure what that something is. Tired to pretend that life has a structure embarks on an exploration of self, only to find fulfilment under the charming spell of beautiful Samsa. But now Boulder must choose between freedom and conformity. Love is tested under the "threatening" eyes of motherhood, sucking-dry all trace of her passion. Boulder struggles to oppose her convictions, feeling insular and worn out, a pariah under her own skin. “Life tears open like a wound that rots and bubbles.” The days dissolve and she remains displaced and confused till the bitter end.
This is an utterly hypnotic novella from the brilliant Eva Baltasar that gave us Permafrost; and a well-deserved candidate for the International Booker Prize 2023.
Kudos also to Julia Sanches for the wonderful translation.
“Nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative…”
4.25/5
May 21, 2023
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. I pause – to gather my breath, and blinded eyes. But she doesn’t. With a singular aim that never misses the target, she shoots. She shoots maniac, she shoots incandescent. She shoots tender, she shoots ruthless. She shoots diabolic, she shoots sober. But Boulder doesn’t stop. That’s the one thing she doesn’t do – stop; throughout her journey in this rage of a book that sometimes surrenders to the untamed flame of desire and sometimes, rots under the dead embers of love.
Her hair looks like it’s about to self-immolate, a bundle of twigs that huddles together the second before the fire is lit. I wish she was always like this.I haven’t met someone like Boulder in a long time – she embarks upon a sailing ship by the coast of Chile as its popular chef and disembarks from it for good to support her beloved in Iceland with the same conviction. Easy doesn’t come to her and she doesn’t seek it. What she seeks is clarity. Shifting love, moving wants, transforming bodies, expanding spaces, hazy priorities, changing behaviors – she drowns in them like an amateur swimmer every time, dreadfully stripped of off her experienced laps.
I’m a winter flower that bloomed by mistake and closes again.Eva Baltasar writes with a crushing urgency that is impossible to shake off. Page after page, her words leapt like a possessed snake and dug its fangs in me with remarkable precision and consistency.
Desire cannot be killed, it can only be fermented and rocked to sleep.Her depiction of love between Boulder and Samsa consumed me to the point of turning me a voyeur and just when I was settling into this new skin, she dropped me in a whirlpool of motherhood that besieges one and repels the other. This rabid dance of their relationship on the slider of time held me in such a circle of tense inebriation that my eyes failed to see through her legerdemain which was, after all, never her intent. In sensual, raw and metaphorically aching narrative spanning a decade, Eva brings to fore the inner schemas of desires that twist majestically to dissipate some telling truths. I still cannot fathom a book like this can breathe; perhaps, I am still held at neck by the silk and slither of the being she has conjured….
The power she exudes is subtle, almost tender, beautiful and supple yet resilient, like the silk of a spider’s web.
April 16, 2023
Boulder (2020) by Eva Baltasar is as dark and bleak as the cover suggests. It is also raw, addictive and intense. One aspect is optimistic though: it turns out there are places in the world where gay people do not suffer for expressing their sexual identities, queer couples are treated with respect, and their love feels as natural as air. For example, Iceland, where this novella is set, seems to be free from homonegative attitudes. I wish I could enlist my country here but truth be told, I have goosebumps when I imagine what Samsa, Boulder and their daughter's life would be like in Poland, where the ruling party holds and freely expresses negative feelings towards LGBT people.
In his famous Meditation XVII John Donne argues:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
Eva Baltasar begs to differ. Some people are independent islands and their efforts to belong, to be a part of something are doomed. For example, the protagonist of this novella. There is a grain of irony in Boulder's name: the main character and narrator, two in one, turns out to be much more fragile and less dependable than a rock. This theme appealed to me much more than the love story or the parenting drama part.
Boulder is a study and a chronicle of a relationship gone awry. Unfortunately, none of the conclusions sounds like a revelation, more like advice from women's magazines: poor communication leads to disaster; love is a neverending project which requires engagement, devotion and time from both partners; you have to be assertive in the relationship because sacrificing your own needs leads to frustration. From the very beginning, it is obvious that despite physical dominance, it is not Boulder who sets the rules here but Samsa: She doesn’t like my name, and gives me a new one. Then more demands follow with no consideration of what Boulder thinks/wants/needs. These conclusions are never told expressis verbis, they are veiled in poetical prose but hover in the air.
Eva Baltasar has published ten volumes of poetry so I hoped I was for a real treat. The stylistic cocktail which the author serves consists of opposites: the trivial and the lyrical, the crude and the tender. Unfortunately, these registers did not blend smoothly here. Manneristically short sentences are overloaded with similes and metaphors. Besides, some passages sounded oddly familiar, for example:
Her quiet body opens like a peony
or
She looks at me. I feel myself die a little.
Please, note that I am an outlier here. Almost everyone marvels at Eva Baltasar's writing style.
I am trying to imagine homophobic readers' response to Boulder, provided they reach for it someday. Would this novella reduce their hostility and stereotypical beliefs about homosexual people? Would it be an eye-opening experience teaching them tolerance and understanding? Samsa and Boulder's problems are so relatable, heterosexual couples face them also. Or perhaps quite the opposite: would this book be grist to the mill of the homonegative attitudes? How would prejudiced, anti-gay readers react to Samsa and Boulder's flings, to the fact that their relationship is based mostly on physical intimacy? Fingers crossed for my first theory.
Two Women by Carl Hofer.
In his famous Meditation XVII John Donne argues:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
Eva Baltasar begs to differ. Some people are independent islands and their efforts to belong, to be a part of something are doomed. For example, the protagonist of this novella. There is a grain of irony in Boulder's name: the main character and narrator, two in one, turns out to be much more fragile and less dependable than a rock. This theme appealed to me much more than the love story or the parenting drama part.
Boulder is a study and a chronicle of a relationship gone awry. Unfortunately, none of the conclusions sounds like a revelation, more like advice from women's magazines: poor communication leads to disaster; love is a neverending project which requires engagement, devotion and time from both partners; you have to be assertive in the relationship because sacrificing your own needs leads to frustration. From the very beginning, it is obvious that despite physical dominance, it is not Boulder who sets the rules here but Samsa: She doesn’t like my name, and gives me a new one. Then more demands follow with no consideration of what Boulder thinks/wants/needs. These conclusions are never told expressis verbis, they are veiled in poetical prose but hover in the air.
Eva Baltasar has published ten volumes of poetry so I hoped I was for a real treat. The stylistic cocktail which the author serves consists of opposites: the trivial and the lyrical, the crude and the tender. Unfortunately, these registers did not blend smoothly here. Manneristically short sentences are overloaded with similes and metaphors. Besides, some passages sounded oddly familiar, for example:
Her quiet body opens like a peony
or
She looks at me. I feel myself die a little.
Please, note that I am an outlier here. Almost everyone marvels at Eva Baltasar's writing style.
I am trying to imagine homophobic readers' response to Boulder, provided they reach for it someday. Would this novella reduce their hostility and stereotypical beliefs about homosexual people? Would it be an eye-opening experience teaching them tolerance and understanding? Samsa and Boulder's problems are so relatable, heterosexual couples face them also. Or perhaps quite the opposite: would this book be grist to the mill of the homonegative attitudes? How would prejudiced, anti-gay readers react to Samsa and Boulder's flings, to the fact that their relationship is based mostly on physical intimacy? Fingers crossed for my first theory.
Two Women by Carl Hofer.
September 7, 2023
Thank you, GR friends who encouraged me, to read “Boulder” by Eva Baltasar, translated beautifully by Julia Sanches. Baltasar is poetic in her prose, and Sanches was able to translate her poetic feelings, thoughts, and observations. Translators don’t get enough accolades for their brilliant work.
Our “sort-of” unnamed narrator is nicknamed Boulder by her lover, Samsa. Boulder is a no-nonsense cook on a merchant ship. She requires very little, just great sex and smokes. Samsa is approaching 40, and her biological clock is ticking. Boulder doesn’t possess that clock and is mystified as to Samsa’s obsession.
Samsa moves them to an apartment in Reykjavik Iceland; she works 10 hours a day leaving Boulder rudderless. The women have been together for eight years, and Boulder is afraid of losing Samsa.
What I enjoyed was Boulder’s musings on being a parent. Her ambivalence at first, and then downright animosity towards being a mother was written well. Author Baltasar brilliantly pens a story of a person who struggles with becoming a parent yet wanting to maintain a romantic/sexual relationship. Boulder’s conflicted feelings burned off the page. Boulder’s need for freedom complicates her need for human contact. She is afraid to lose Samsa.
When Samsa embraces her changing body and pregnancy, Boulder becomes even more confused. What’s a girl to do? She hits the local pub where she drinks away her sorrows with Brennivin, her drinking buddy.
This is an interesting study of an “alternative” look at motherhood. Boulder’s version of motherhood is a bit different than most, but her love for her child is strong, just different. Can a person be a wonderer, and explorer, and still be a parent? Baltasar explores motherhood with a very interesting protagonist.
Our “sort-of” unnamed narrator is nicknamed Boulder by her lover, Samsa. Boulder is a no-nonsense cook on a merchant ship. She requires very little, just great sex and smokes. Samsa is approaching 40, and her biological clock is ticking. Boulder doesn’t possess that clock and is mystified as to Samsa’s obsession.
Samsa moves them to an apartment in Reykjavik Iceland; she works 10 hours a day leaving Boulder rudderless. The women have been together for eight years, and Boulder is afraid of losing Samsa.
What I enjoyed was Boulder’s musings on being a parent. Her ambivalence at first, and then downright animosity towards being a mother was written well. Author Baltasar brilliantly pens a story of a person who struggles with becoming a parent yet wanting to maintain a romantic/sexual relationship. Boulder’s conflicted feelings burned off the page. Boulder’s need for freedom complicates her need for human contact. She is afraid to lose Samsa.
When Samsa embraces her changing body and pregnancy, Boulder becomes even more confused. What’s a girl to do? She hits the local pub where she drinks away her sorrows with Brennivin, her drinking buddy.
This is an interesting study of an “alternative” look at motherhood. Boulder’s version of motherhood is a bit different than most, but her love for her child is strong, just different. Can a person be a wonderer, and explorer, and still be a parent? Baltasar explores motherhood with a very interesting protagonist.
April 26, 2023
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023
Catalan poet Eva Baltasar writes about a woman who, as the title not so subtly suggests, resembles a rock: Working as a cook on a merchant ship off the Chilean coast, she leads an independent, self-reliant, but also quite self-enclosed existence. Enjoying her freedom and solitude, she travels between islands and land, until she falls in love with Samsa, a Scandinavian geologist who works for an oil company and affectionately calls her new lover Boulder, "like those large, solitary rocks (...) isolated and exposed to every element.". The newly re-named protagonist follows Samsa to Reykjavik, where her love for Samsa competes with feelings of suffocation that come with living a middle class life in an apartment at the outskirts of town. Seven years later, the passion wanes, which coincides with Samsa, now nearing 40, wanting to be a mother. Our narrator has no interest in holding such a role, but agrees.
The metamorphosis of Samsa (Franz Kafka, ya know?) from lover to mother evokes complicated feelings in our narrator, and this is what sets this text apart: Baltasar masterfully shows how Boulder oscillates between self-sufficiency and the desire for intimacy and connection, and how the lovers grow apart prompted by the primal experience of motherhood. Feeling cut off from Samsa and Tinna, the child, Boulder doesn't feel free and unattached, but lonely and exiled. The lyrical language expertly depicts the emotions felt by the complex narrator, who is not written to be sympathetic (generally an idiotic category in fiction), but to be authentic.
The book is the second part in a trilogy about female lives, written by a female and told by a female narrator. Baltasar is great at writing unruly, messy women, and I guess I need to read the other two parts as well.
Catalan poet Eva Baltasar writes about a woman who, as the title not so subtly suggests, resembles a rock: Working as a cook on a merchant ship off the Chilean coast, she leads an independent, self-reliant, but also quite self-enclosed existence. Enjoying her freedom and solitude, she travels between islands and land, until she falls in love with Samsa, a Scandinavian geologist who works for an oil company and affectionately calls her new lover Boulder, "like those large, solitary rocks (...) isolated and exposed to every element.". The newly re-named protagonist follows Samsa to Reykjavik, where her love for Samsa competes with feelings of suffocation that come with living a middle class life in an apartment at the outskirts of town. Seven years later, the passion wanes, which coincides with Samsa, now nearing 40, wanting to be a mother. Our narrator has no interest in holding such a role, but agrees.
The metamorphosis of Samsa (Franz Kafka, ya know?) from lover to mother evokes complicated feelings in our narrator, and this is what sets this text apart: Baltasar masterfully shows how Boulder oscillates between self-sufficiency and the desire for intimacy and connection, and how the lovers grow apart prompted by the primal experience of motherhood. Feeling cut off from Samsa and Tinna, the child, Boulder doesn't feel free and unattached, but lonely and exiled. The lyrical language expertly depicts the emotions felt by the complex narrator, who is not written to be sympathetic (generally an idiotic category in fiction), but to be authentic.
The book is the second part in a trilogy about female lives, written by a female and told by a female narrator. Baltasar is great at writing unruly, messy women, and I guess I need to read the other two parts as well.
March 21, 2021
M'ha agradat més que Permagel, crec, pel tema, per l'època de la vida. Recordo Permagel pel llenguatge, per l'humor negre, per les descripcions del desig. Aquí, per moments, sobretot al començament, se m'ha fet feixuga la intensitat descriptiva, el llenguatge poètic, que després es va moldejant a favor de l'argument. Hi ha frases que són perles. Hi ha paràgrafs que, per brutals, et fan esclatar amb un riure amarg.
March 14, 2023
Catalan author and poet, Eva Baltasar follows her debut novel Permafrost with the second in a planned triptych, each tightly focused on an individual woman’s experiences. Themes around solitude and the overwhelming pull of physical desire are once again central. Everything’s told in the first person from an unnamed woman's perspective, she's exchanged her past in Spain for a remote Patagonian Island. Her existence is deliberately nomadic; rootlessness and a love of freedom are her defining features. She’s all about the journey, never the destination. She takes lovers but they're "as fleeting as shooting stars.” Eventually she lands the perfect job, cooking on a freighter, hopping from one isolated port to another. But then she meets Samsa, a Scandinavian geologist working ashore, and she’s instantly infatuated.
But Samsa’s name should be a clue about where this is headed, towards a Kafka-like, metamorphosis, unlikely to end well. Samsa names the narrator Boulder, after the solitary, mythical rocks found in Southern Patagonia. Together the women wind up in Reykjavik, where Boulder grudgingly yields to Samsa’s narrative. Years pass then, as Samsa nears forty, she becomes fixated on having a child: like the local “breeders,” enslaved to biology, that Boulder so despises. And Samsa’s bizarre transformation threatens to demolish “the flesh-and-bone scaffolding” that sustains their relationship. Boulder’s very much a poet’s novel, with prose that’s often closer in feel to poetry. Baltasar's imagery’s dense, fierce, fresh, and startling. There’s a hypnotic, visceral immediacy in the depiction of Boulder's inner world; a place where rage and disgust are bound up with love and a fiery, sexual connection. Winner of the Omnium Prize for best Catalan novel of 2020, Boulder’s brief, just over a hundred pages, but it’s also intense and intricate, a piece I’ll definitely need to revisit to fully grasp its complexities. Translated here by Julia Sanches.
Thanks to Edelweiss Plus and publisher And Other Stories for an arc
But Samsa’s name should be a clue about where this is headed, towards a Kafka-like, metamorphosis, unlikely to end well. Samsa names the narrator Boulder, after the solitary, mythical rocks found in Southern Patagonia. Together the women wind up in Reykjavik, where Boulder grudgingly yields to Samsa’s narrative. Years pass then, as Samsa nears forty, she becomes fixated on having a child: like the local “breeders,” enslaved to biology, that Boulder so despises. And Samsa’s bizarre transformation threatens to demolish “the flesh-and-bone scaffolding” that sustains their relationship. Boulder’s very much a poet’s novel, with prose that’s often closer in feel to poetry. Baltasar's imagery’s dense, fierce, fresh, and startling. There’s a hypnotic, visceral immediacy in the depiction of Boulder's inner world; a place where rage and disgust are bound up with love and a fiery, sexual connection. Winner of the Omnium Prize for best Catalan novel of 2020, Boulder’s brief, just over a hundred pages, but it’s also intense and intricate, a piece I’ll definitely need to revisit to fully grasp its complexities. Translated here by Julia Sanches.
Thanks to Edelweiss Plus and publisher And Other Stories for an arc
November 28, 2021
Una embarassada evident és com una bruixa antiga, custodia el secret de la vida i això la fa ser més que humana, pràcticament semidivina. El seu cos enèrgic és una boca amplíssima que parla per ella, vulguin o no escoltar-la.
La maternitat, la feminitat són els eixos d'aquesta trilogia que Eva Baltasar va començar amb Permagel. Els personatges canvien però la temàtica i el punt de vista són el fil conductor de les diferents parts. Aquí també, la protagonista és una dona solitària que sap que, per la seva personalitat i orientació sexual, no encaixa als estereotips patriarcals i només cerca l'aïllament i la pau d'esperit. Canvia constantment de treball i finalment la trobem fent de cuinera en un petit vaixell als mars de la Patagònia. El seu univers s'altera quan coneix la Samsa, de la qual s'enamora amb passió arrabassada, tant que s'arrisca a seguir-la a Reikiavick i a establir una relació de parella estable i fins a un cert punt convencional:
Les casetes unifamiliars noves de trinca tenen ànima, una ànima famolenca que s'alimenta de la teva xuclant-ne la llibertat, la independència, qualsevol indici de passió.
La Samsa l'estima tal com és però li canvia el nom per 'Boulder', que pensa que la defineix millor:
No li agrada el meu nom i me'n posa un de nou. Diu que m'assemblo a les grans roques solitàries que hi ha al sud de la Patagònia, peces de món que van sobrar després de la creació, aïllades, exposades a tot.
L'ambient fred d'Islàndia, que ho envaeix tot, està molt ben reflexat, amb una prosa poètica que cal llegir a poc a poc per trobar-hi tots els matissos. La narració avança imparable i de seguida ens trobem deu anys després, quan la Samsa sent la necessitat de ser mare i per Boulder és el principi del fi de la relació:
La decisió anticipa un ésser que ja existeix i que ho colonitza tot. La seva presència té densitat, ocupa la casa amb tentacles definitius, s'enfonsa al crani dels seus habitants i s'arrapa al tel que els embolcalla el cervell.
Boulder segueix tot el procés de la maternitat amb una barreja d'horror i fascinació, sentint que és una amenaça a la seva posició. El llenguatge amb que ho descriu és dur, físic, sense concessions, gairebé com si no parlés de persones:
Durant les sessions de tres quarts d'hora m'adono que les embarassades s'assemblen com sembrats, com animals de granja. Podria canviar la Samsa per qualsevol altra.
En conjunt és un text molt sincer i valent, sobre un tema envoltat de tabús com és la maternitat i que l'autora examina sense prejudicis, fent-nos viure la mirada d'una dona que no encaixa als rols tradicionals. I està molt, però que molt ben escrit.
Ni un pas enrere: la maternitat és el tatuatge que et fixa i et numera la vida al braç, la taca que inhibeix la llibertat.
La maternitat, la feminitat són els eixos d'aquesta trilogia que Eva Baltasar va començar amb Permagel. Els personatges canvien però la temàtica i el punt de vista són el fil conductor de les diferents parts. Aquí també, la protagonista és una dona solitària que sap que, per la seva personalitat i orientació sexual, no encaixa als estereotips patriarcals i només cerca l'aïllament i la pau d'esperit. Canvia constantment de treball i finalment la trobem fent de cuinera en un petit vaixell als mars de la Patagònia. El seu univers s'altera quan coneix la Samsa, de la qual s'enamora amb passió arrabassada, tant que s'arrisca a seguir-la a Reikiavick i a establir una relació de parella estable i fins a un cert punt convencional:
Les casetes unifamiliars noves de trinca tenen ànima, una ànima famolenca que s'alimenta de la teva xuclant-ne la llibertat, la independència, qualsevol indici de passió.
La Samsa l'estima tal com és però li canvia el nom per 'Boulder', que pensa que la defineix millor:
No li agrada el meu nom i me'n posa un de nou. Diu que m'assemblo a les grans roques solitàries que hi ha al sud de la Patagònia, peces de món que van sobrar després de la creació, aïllades, exposades a tot.
L'ambient fred d'Islàndia, que ho envaeix tot, està molt ben reflexat, amb una prosa poètica que cal llegir a poc a poc per trobar-hi tots els matissos. La narració avança imparable i de seguida ens trobem deu anys després, quan la Samsa sent la necessitat de ser mare i per Boulder és el principi del fi de la relació:
La decisió anticipa un ésser que ja existeix i que ho colonitza tot. La seva presència té densitat, ocupa la casa amb tentacles definitius, s'enfonsa al crani dels seus habitants i s'arrapa al tel que els embolcalla el cervell.
Boulder segueix tot el procés de la maternitat amb una barreja d'horror i fascinació, sentint que és una amenaça a la seva posició. El llenguatge amb que ho descriu és dur, físic, sense concessions, gairebé com si no parlés de persones:
Durant les sessions de tres quarts d'hora m'adono que les embarassades s'assemblen com sembrats, com animals de granja. Podria canviar la Samsa per qualsevol altra.
En conjunt és un text molt sincer i valent, sobre un tema envoltat de tabús com és la maternitat i que l'autora examina sense prejudicis, fent-nos viure la mirada d'una dona que no encaixa als rols tradicionals. I està molt, però que molt ben escrit.
Ni un pas enrere: la maternitat és el tatuatge que et fixa i et numera la vida al braç, la taca que inhibeix la llibertat.
September 13, 2024
Wow. Boulder is an incredibly crafted novella, which leaves the reader utterly enthralled over its, just over, 100 pages. Eva Baltasar is a talented writer, who manages to both evoke and display emotions so well here. This story is full of brilliantly worded metaphors and similes. I understand that the writing style may not be to everyone’s taste, but if you gel with it, then it might end up becoming a new favourite!
You know when you are that blown away by a book that you cannot quite articulate everything you feel about it? That’s where I’m at right now.
Boulder is a story of the complexities of Motherhood, through the lense of Sapphic relationships. The main character, nicknamed Boulder, uproots her entire life to move to Iceland to be with a woman who she had a passionate love affair with, Samsa. It soon becomes apparent that they both want different things in life, Samsa is desperate to become a Mother. Their relationship will be put to the ultimate test when Samsa becomes pregnant. Will Motherhood she so richly desires turn her into a complete stranger?
5 Stars and added to my favourites shelf!
You know when you are that blown away by a book that you cannot quite articulate everything you feel about it? That’s where I’m at right now.
Boulder is a story of the complexities of Motherhood, through the lense of Sapphic relationships. The main character, nicknamed Boulder, uproots her entire life to move to Iceland to be with a woman who she had a passionate love affair with, Samsa. It soon becomes apparent that they both want different things in life, Samsa is desperate to become a Mother. Their relationship will be put to the ultimate test when Samsa becomes pregnant. Will Motherhood she so richly desires turn her into a complete stranger?
5 Stars and added to my favourites shelf!
November 16, 2024
3.5
A solitary, chain smoking woman who works as a cook on a merchant ship, falls in love immediately with Samsa
when she meets her at a port along the way.
She abandons life at sea to live with Samsa (who has nicknamed her Boulder) in a pretty, little yellow house
They are quite happy for about eight years until Samsa wants a baby..
Then Boulder sees that three is a crowd as Samsa loses interest in her.
It’s quite a sad story really.
A solitary, chain smoking woman who works as a cook on a merchant ship, falls in love immediately with Samsa
when she meets her at a port along the way.
She abandons life at sea to live with Samsa (who has nicknamed her Boulder) in a pretty, little yellow house
They are quite happy for about eight years until Samsa wants a baby..
Then Boulder sees that three is a crowd as Samsa loses interest in her.
It’s quite a sad story really.
April 24, 2023
Shortlisted for International Booker Prize 2023
A little novel about identity, especially queer identity, and how difficult it is sometimes to evolve ( in a relationship and by becoming a parent), without feeling that you lose yourself.
Many people praised the writing. For me, it felt that it didn't push the story forward. I like wordy prose, but here felt distracting.
I may be in minority, but I liked Boulder more than Samsa.
A little novel about identity, especially queer identity, and how difficult it is sometimes to evolve ( in a relationship and by becoming a parent), without feeling that you lose yourself.
Many people praised the writing. For me, it felt that it didn't push the story forward. I like wordy prose, but here felt distracting.
I may be in minority, but I liked Boulder more than Samsa.
August 23, 2024
Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize
She doesn’t like my name, and gives me a new one. She says I’m like those large, solitary rocks in Southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element. No one knows where they came from. Not even they understand how they are still standing.
Boulder is Julia Sanches’s translation of Eva Baltasar’s Catalan original of the same name, and the second in a triptych (rather than a trilogy) of novels, the third part of which Mamut was published in 2022 in the original and presumably will be out in English in 2023-.
The first novel was Permagel, translated by Sanches: my review.
Both books are published by the wonderful small press And Other Stories, who pioneered the subscription model in the UK:
Boulder opens on a dock in Quellón, a city in Chiloé Island in Chile. Our narrator, whose real name we never learn, has travelled from her native Barcelona to the area, searching not so much for something as for nothing: I’d gone through life fixated on an intangible conviction, tied down by the handful of things that kept me from becoming penniless, an outcast. I needed to face the emptiness, an emptiness I had dreamed of so often I’d turned it into a mast, a centre of gravity to hold onto when life fell to pieces around me. I’d come from nothing, polluted, and yearned for windswept lands.
On the island she had worked, as she had in Spain, as a cook, here for 3 months in summer camps for teenagers: I’m not a chef, I’m just a mess-hall cook, capable and self- taught. The thing I most enjoy about my job is handling food while it’s still whole, when some part of it still speaks of its place in the world, its point of origin, the zone of exclusion that all creatures need in order to thrive. Water, earth, lungs. The perfect conditions for silence. Food comes to us wrapped in skin, and to prepare it you need a knife. If I’ve got one skill in the kitchen, it’s carving things up. The rest is hardly an art. Seasoning, tossing things together, applying heat . . . Your hands end up doing it all on their own. I’ve worked at schools, nursing homes, in a prison. Each job only lasts a few weeks, they slip away from me, spots of grease that I gradually scrub off. The last boss I had before coming to Chiloé tried to give me an explanation: the problem isn’t the food, it’s you. Kitchens require team effort. I’d have to find a really small one if I wanted to work on my own and still make a living.
She boards a freight ship, originally paying for passage, but persuades the captain to keep her on as ship’s cook, in return for room and board, a job she serves at for a few years, and describes as the best she has ever had due to the simplicity of the kitchen, where she works alone, and the lack of complications and obligations, with the ship’s crew friendly but not inquiring:
They relax and watch me work and tell me about their grandmothers – all experts in the kitchen, all queens of humitas and empanadas. The second mate reads out the recipe to me. Humitas are out of the question, but I develop an interest in empanadas. They’re practical and everyone likes them, even though the meat I use is tinned and the olives need more brine. I start the dough in the evenings and let it rise all night. I like to get under the covers knowing that out there another covered body lies awake, working on my behalf. In the morning I’m amazed by how much it’s risen, as if the whole thing – the soft, perfect dome of wheat and its nest-bowl of warmth – were a distant nephew who’s grown up, effortlessly and all of a sudden, in the silence of my absence. I knead the bread, dust it with flour, shape it and take its shape, and imagine I am a simpleminded god about to beget a new tribe. Anything not to feel the hips, the ass, the breasts, the perfect flesh of a woman beneath my hands.
But her desire for companionship remains and on one onshore visit in Chaitén she meets Samsa, a Scandinavian geologist who makes her living from a multinational with blood on its hands.. The two begin an itinerant relationship whenever their respective schedules coincide and Samsa christens her Boulder as per the opening quote. But then after many months Samsa announces she has accepted a new job in Reykjavik and asks Boulder to move there with her, who accepts.
The beauty of the writing in this novel is that all the above, written in rich prose, takes place on just 15 pages.
In Iceland, Samsa works for an oil company (the destruction of nature in which she participates an interesting but purely implicit subtext to the story) and Boulder finds work, first in a pub kitchen and later sets up her own food truck selling her signature empanadas in Parliament Square. But one day, after almost a decade together, and with Samsa approaching 40, their life together is disrupted when Samsa announces she wants a child, an announcement which destroys the peace that Boulder enjoys:
The first person who had the idea of building a pyramid must have been insane. What about the guy who thought it made sense to stick someone in a rocket and shoot them at the stars? Samsa is crazier than the two of them put together.
...
It seems unbelievable that a single decision, a fucking intangible thought, could so violently upset the flesh-and-bone scaffolding of daily life, the steady rhythm of the hours, the predictable, material colour of the landscapes that gives us nourishment and company. The decision precedes a living thing that already exists and takes over everything. Its presence has dimension; it occupies the house with concrete tentacles and sinks into the skulls of the people who live there, and clings to the fine membrane that sheathes their grey matter.
Boulder's rather hysterical, but blackly humorous, reaction continues during the IVF treatment, administered by the high priests of the holy church of insemination, who are ever so wise and down to earth, who are ever so pure, when Samsa falls pregnant (the tyrannical, still-brainless thing inside her, which robs her of all reason while at the same time branding a lessons of undying allegiance onto the hungry, pliant walls of her uterus), through maternity classes (a bit like ultrasound appointments: they generate high expectations and the results are at best confusing. You need either a hangover or an active imagination to be able to appreciate them) and post birth to Samsa's breastfeeding gang.
Boulder finds herself excluded from the strong bond between Samsa and their daughter Tinna's, and seeks refuge in the pub, her food truck and eventually the arms of another woman, although her bond with Tinna, when Samsa consents to leave the two alone.
A powerful, compact and beautifully written portrayal of motherhood from an atypical perspective, and a strong contender for the prize.
She doesn’t like my name, and gives me a new one. She says I’m like those large, solitary rocks in Southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element. No one knows where they came from. Not even they understand how they are still standing.
Boulder is Julia Sanches’s translation of Eva Baltasar’s Catalan original of the same name, and the second in a triptych (rather than a trilogy) of novels, the third part of which Mamut was published in 2022 in the original and presumably will be out in English in 2023-.
The first novel was Permagel, translated by Sanches: my review.
Both books are published by the wonderful small press And Other Stories, who pioneered the subscription model in the UK:
And Other Stories publishes some of the best in contemporary writing, including many translations. We aim to push people’s reading limits and help them discover authors of adventurous and inspiring writing.
Boulder opens on a dock in Quellón, a city in Chiloé Island in Chile. Our narrator, whose real name we never learn, has travelled from her native Barcelona to the area, searching not so much for something as for nothing: I’d gone through life fixated on an intangible conviction, tied down by the handful of things that kept me from becoming penniless, an outcast. I needed to face the emptiness, an emptiness I had dreamed of so often I’d turned it into a mast, a centre of gravity to hold onto when life fell to pieces around me. I’d come from nothing, polluted, and yearned for windswept lands.
On the island she had worked, as she had in Spain, as a cook, here for 3 months in summer camps for teenagers: I’m not a chef, I’m just a mess-hall cook, capable and self- taught. The thing I most enjoy about my job is handling food while it’s still whole, when some part of it still speaks of its place in the world, its point of origin, the zone of exclusion that all creatures need in order to thrive. Water, earth, lungs. The perfect conditions for silence. Food comes to us wrapped in skin, and to prepare it you need a knife. If I’ve got one skill in the kitchen, it’s carving things up. The rest is hardly an art. Seasoning, tossing things together, applying heat . . . Your hands end up doing it all on their own. I’ve worked at schools, nursing homes, in a prison. Each job only lasts a few weeks, they slip away from me, spots of grease that I gradually scrub off. The last boss I had before coming to Chiloé tried to give me an explanation: the problem isn’t the food, it’s you. Kitchens require team effort. I’d have to find a really small one if I wanted to work on my own and still make a living.
She boards a freight ship, originally paying for passage, but persuades the captain to keep her on as ship’s cook, in return for room and board, a job she serves at for a few years, and describes as the best she has ever had due to the simplicity of the kitchen, where she works alone, and the lack of complications and obligations, with the ship’s crew friendly but not inquiring:
They relax and watch me work and tell me about their grandmothers – all experts in the kitchen, all queens of humitas and empanadas. The second mate reads out the recipe to me. Humitas are out of the question, but I develop an interest in empanadas. They’re practical and everyone likes them, even though the meat I use is tinned and the olives need more brine. I start the dough in the evenings and let it rise all night. I like to get under the covers knowing that out there another covered body lies awake, working on my behalf. In the morning I’m amazed by how much it’s risen, as if the whole thing – the soft, perfect dome of wheat and its nest-bowl of warmth – were a distant nephew who’s grown up, effortlessly and all of a sudden, in the silence of my absence. I knead the bread, dust it with flour, shape it and take its shape, and imagine I am a simpleminded god about to beget a new tribe. Anything not to feel the hips, the ass, the breasts, the perfect flesh of a woman beneath my hands.
But her desire for companionship remains and on one onshore visit in Chaitén she meets Samsa, a Scandinavian geologist who makes her living from a multinational with blood on its hands.. The two begin an itinerant relationship whenever their respective schedules coincide and Samsa christens her Boulder as per the opening quote. But then after many months Samsa announces she has accepted a new job in Reykjavik and asks Boulder to move there with her, who accepts.
The beauty of the writing in this novel is that all the above, written in rich prose, takes place on just 15 pages.
In Iceland, Samsa works for an oil company (the destruction of nature in which she participates an interesting but purely implicit subtext to the story) and Boulder finds work, first in a pub kitchen and later sets up her own food truck selling her signature empanadas in Parliament Square. But one day, after almost a decade together, and with Samsa approaching 40, their life together is disrupted when Samsa announces she wants a child, an announcement which destroys the peace that Boulder enjoys:
The first person who had the idea of building a pyramid must have been insane. What about the guy who thought it made sense to stick someone in a rocket and shoot them at the stars? Samsa is crazier than the two of them put together.
...
It seems unbelievable that a single decision, a fucking intangible thought, could so violently upset the flesh-and-bone scaffolding of daily life, the steady rhythm of the hours, the predictable, material colour of the landscapes that gives us nourishment and company. The decision precedes a living thing that already exists and takes over everything. Its presence has dimension; it occupies the house with concrete tentacles and sinks into the skulls of the people who live there, and clings to the fine membrane that sheathes their grey matter.
Boulder's rather hysterical, but blackly humorous, reaction continues during the IVF treatment, administered by the high priests of the holy church of insemination, who are ever so wise and down to earth, who are ever so pure, when Samsa falls pregnant (the tyrannical, still-brainless thing inside her, which robs her of all reason while at the same time branding a lessons of undying allegiance onto the hungry, pliant walls of her uterus), through maternity classes (a bit like ultrasound appointments: they generate high expectations and the results are at best confusing. You need either a hangover or an active imagination to be able to appreciate them) and post birth to Samsa's breastfeeding gang.
Boulder finds herself excluded from the strong bond between Samsa and their daughter Tinna's, and seeks refuge in the pub, her food truck and eventually the arms of another woman, although her bond with Tinna, when Samsa consents to leave the two alone.
A powerful, compact and beautifully written portrayal of motherhood from an atypical perspective, and a strong contender for the prize.
May 2, 2024
so so good! i didn’t know before reading this that eve baltasar was a poet, but you can really tell by her prose. definitely going to read the other books in this triptych.
April 15, 2023
Life develops without overwhelming me, it squeezes into every minute, it implodes; I hold it in my hands. I can give anything up, because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.
This short novel by Catalan poet Eva Baltasar follows a woman nicknamed Boulder on her journey through life. Boulder, who is like a solitary rock, a piece of world left over after creating, isolated and exposed to every element, falls in love with a woman named Samsa and settles down with her. Soon, after Samsa’s decision to become a mother, Boulder finds herself out of her element.
While immersing myself into Boulder’s world, I realized that the prose was full of metaphors, similes and other figures of speech - usually I find this kind of writing quite underwhelming. Yet, after getting to know the narrator slightly better, I felt it wasn’t completely incongruous with her peculiar and detached, but deeply poetic worldview. Boulder’s raw vocabulary is her second nature, there is something addictive about her voice. An abundant marine imagery with its sea, ships and sailors hints at the bigger picture which is to take place in this novel.
Boulder’s view on motherhood is rather unconventional - still a social taboo - but not less valid than any other. Challenging social and gender roles, this novel also encompasses a difficult relationship between Boulder and her partner, two women with very different priorities - which is far from common in literature. Boulder is a free spirit and a wanderer in the first place, someone who refuses to conform to social expectations and values her independence above anything else. On the other hand, I wanted to see if there were any other options available for Boulder, but having in mind this narrator’s wandering nature, her choices make sense.
All it takes is one night to flee the castle. All it takes is living there and being fine with the possibility of throwing yourself - like any other piece of rock - into the open sky.
Boulder is the second installment of a triptych in which Eva Baltasar explores in first person the universe of three different women, who live the contradictions of their time. Despite some qualms about the writing, I thought Boulder was a refreshing novel with a subversive take on motherhood, gender roles and relationships.
3.75/5
Paul Strand, Rock, Port Lorne, Nova Scotia, 1919
This short novel by Catalan poet Eva Baltasar follows a woman nicknamed Boulder on her journey through life. Boulder, who is like a solitary rock, a piece of world left over after creating, isolated and exposed to every element, falls in love with a woman named Samsa and settles down with her. Soon, after Samsa’s decision to become a mother, Boulder finds herself out of her element.
While immersing myself into Boulder’s world, I realized that the prose was full of metaphors, similes and other figures of speech - usually I find this kind of writing quite underwhelming. Yet, after getting to know the narrator slightly better, I felt it wasn’t completely incongruous with her peculiar and detached, but deeply poetic worldview. Boulder’s raw vocabulary is her second nature, there is something addictive about her voice. An abundant marine imagery with its sea, ships and sailors hints at the bigger picture which is to take place in this novel.
Boulder’s view on motherhood is rather unconventional - still a social taboo - but not less valid than any other. Challenging social and gender roles, this novel also encompasses a difficult relationship between Boulder and her partner, two women with very different priorities - which is far from common in literature. Boulder is a free spirit and a wanderer in the first place, someone who refuses to conform to social expectations and values her independence above anything else. On the other hand, I wanted to see if there were any other options available for Boulder, but having in mind this narrator’s wandering nature, her choices make sense.
All it takes is one night to flee the castle. All it takes is living there and being fine with the possibility of throwing yourself - like any other piece of rock - into the open sky.
Boulder is the second installment of a triptych in which Eva Baltasar explores in first person the universe of three different women, who live the contradictions of their time. Despite some qualms about the writing, I thought Boulder was a refreshing novel with a subversive take on motherhood, gender roles and relationships.
3.75/5
Paul Strand, Rock, Port Lorne, Nova Scotia, 1919
May 29, 2024
#Mothering May #3
3,5*
Loves leave a residue and residues have memories.
Se a protagonista do livro anterior de Eva Baltasar, “Permafrost” era um bloco de gelo, a de “Boulder” é um rochedo. Enquanto no primeiro predomina o humor negro, neste impera um forte lirismo, mas ambas são mulheres solitárias e independentes, um pouco ariscas e desligadas, que têm o sexo como impulso vital nas suas relações homossexuais.
No início desta obra, Boulder trabalha como cozinheira num navio de mercadorias na costa do Chile.
The boat loves and nurtures us, it invites us to take another look at ourselves. I let myself be strung along; life happens without overwhelming me, it squeezes into every minute, it implodes; I hold it in my hands. I can give anything up, because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.
Quando conhece Samsa, apaixona-se de tal forma que aceita ir viver com ela para Helsínquia. Em poucas páginas passam-se os anos a acompanharmos a dinâmica do casal, a inadequação e inquietação de Boulder, e dez anos depois, Samsa sente um desejo imperativo de ser mãe, apesar da resistência de Boulder.
The fact that she’s moved, the fact that she thinks of me as a challenge and believes she can train me the way a farmer would train a wolf – it drives me up the fucking wall.
“Boulder” é um livro sobre o desejo de ser mãe e a opção de não o ser, mas é antes de mais sobre relações matrimoniais e, nesse aspecto, não só não traz nada de novo como opta por criar uma crispação algo forçada entre as personagens. Se durante o processo de inseminação artificial e ao longo da gravidez, Samsa faz tudo por incluir a companheira, assim que a bebé nasce há um corte inexplicado de relações, um apego irracional à criança que faz Boulder sentir-se alienada e pouco mais do que uma mulher-a-dias.
I don’t want to think. I feel used, I feel isolated, I feel spent. I don’t like this life. It’s the life of a seasonal worker, a serf. Better not to think. Under these circunstances, thinking isn’t just dangerous – it’s dumb.
Se nenhuma mulher é uma ilha, ao longo desta obra, vemos a protagonista tanto a criar pontes como a destruí-las. Apesar do abuso de metáforas e da trama um pouco artificial, pretendo ler tudo o que Baltasar produzir nesta sua voz muito própria.
I can’t live everyday chasing after that kind of life. A life with no fat, meant for consumption only. When I undress in the evening, the turtleneck snags at my head and reminds me that birth is nothing at all – the danger lies in being reborn.
3,5*
Loves leave a residue and residues have memories.
Se a protagonista do livro anterior de Eva Baltasar, “Permafrost” era um bloco de gelo, a de “Boulder” é um rochedo. Enquanto no primeiro predomina o humor negro, neste impera um forte lirismo, mas ambas são mulheres solitárias e independentes, um pouco ariscas e desligadas, que têm o sexo como impulso vital nas suas relações homossexuais.
No início desta obra, Boulder trabalha como cozinheira num navio de mercadorias na costa do Chile.
The boat loves and nurtures us, it invites us to take another look at ourselves. I let myself be strung along; life happens without overwhelming me, it squeezes into every minute, it implodes; I hold it in my hands. I can give anything up, because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.
Quando conhece Samsa, apaixona-se de tal forma que aceita ir viver com ela para Helsínquia. Em poucas páginas passam-se os anos a acompanharmos a dinâmica do casal, a inadequação e inquietação de Boulder, e dez anos depois, Samsa sente um desejo imperativo de ser mãe, apesar da resistência de Boulder.
The fact that she’s moved, the fact that she thinks of me as a challenge and believes she can train me the way a farmer would train a wolf – it drives me up the fucking wall.
“Boulder” é um livro sobre o desejo de ser mãe e a opção de não o ser, mas é antes de mais sobre relações matrimoniais e, nesse aspecto, não só não traz nada de novo como opta por criar uma crispação algo forçada entre as personagens. Se durante o processo de inseminação artificial e ao longo da gravidez, Samsa faz tudo por incluir a companheira, assim que a bebé nasce há um corte inexplicado de relações, um apego irracional à criança que faz Boulder sentir-se alienada e pouco mais do que uma mulher-a-dias.
I don’t want to think. I feel used, I feel isolated, I feel spent. I don’t like this life. It’s the life of a seasonal worker, a serf. Better not to think. Under these circunstances, thinking isn’t just dangerous – it’s dumb.
Se nenhuma mulher é uma ilha, ao longo desta obra, vemos a protagonista tanto a criar pontes como a destruí-las. Apesar do abuso de metáforas e da trama um pouco artificial, pretendo ler tudo o que Baltasar produzir nesta sua voz muito própria.
I can’t live everyday chasing after that kind of life. A life with no fat, meant for consumption only. When I undress in the evening, the turtleneck snags at my head and reminds me that birth is nothing at all – the danger lies in being reborn.
April 15, 2023
To Be a Rock and Not To Roll
Review of the And Other Stories paperback edition (September 2022) translated by Julia Sanches from the Catalan language original published by Club Editor (March 2020)
Maybe it was the point of it all (i.e. lesbian parents are just like everyone else), but this lesbian couple's motherhood story came across pretty much as a heterotypical story. The title character, otherwise nameless but nicknamed 'Boulder', is a ship's cook in Chile who becomes infatuated with geologist Samsa and then joins her in moving to Iceland when the latter accepts a job offer there. As Samsa begins to want a child, Boulder retreats more into avoidance and drinking sessions of Brennivín (the local Aquavit) with friend Ragnar. After a successful IVF, Samsa increasingly disassociates from Boulder who takes recourse in an affair. Boulder does take some joy in occasional outings with the baby when Samsa allows it. Then there is a final crisis.
Setting the story in Iceland added to its atmosphere of nordic depression and must have been meant as a metaphor. The writer Eva Baltasar is known primarily as a poet, although this is the 2nd of a triptych of novels, preceded by Permagel (2018) (translated into English as Permafrost (2018)) and followed by Mamut (2022) (not yet translated into English).
Other Reviews
Review at Pop Matters Spanish Poet Eva Baltasar tackles the Lesbian Parenting Novel with ‘Boulder’ by Rhea Rollman, January 12, 2023.
Review at the New York Times She is a Rock, She is an Island by Greg Mania, August 21, 2022.
Trivia and Links
Boulder is longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Award. You can read further about the longlist of 13 books here. The shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday, April 18. The winning title will be announced on Tuesday, May 23, 2023.
You can read an interview with Julia Sanches about translating Boulder at the Above The Treeline website here.
Review of the And Other Stories paperback edition (September 2022) translated by Julia Sanches from the Catalan language original published by Club Editor (March 2020)
Maybe it was the point of it all (i.e. lesbian parents are just like everyone else), but this lesbian couple's motherhood story came across pretty much as a heterotypical story. The title character, otherwise nameless but nicknamed 'Boulder', is a ship's cook in Chile who becomes infatuated with geologist Samsa and then joins her in moving to Iceland when the latter accepts a job offer there. As Samsa begins to want a child, Boulder retreats more into avoidance and drinking sessions of Brennivín (the local Aquavit) with friend Ragnar. After a successful IVF, Samsa increasingly disassociates from Boulder who takes recourse in an affair. Boulder does take some joy in occasional outings with the baby when Samsa allows it. Then there is a final crisis.
Setting the story in Iceland added to its atmosphere of nordic depression and must have been meant as a metaphor. The writer Eva Baltasar is known primarily as a poet, although this is the 2nd of a triptych of novels, preceded by Permagel (2018) (translated into English as Permafrost (2018)) and followed by Mamut (2022) (not yet translated into English).
Other Reviews
Review at Pop Matters Spanish Poet Eva Baltasar tackles the Lesbian Parenting Novel with ‘Boulder’ by Rhea Rollman, January 12, 2023.
Review at the New York Times She is a Rock, She is an Island by Greg Mania, August 21, 2022.
Trivia and Links
Boulder is longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Award. You can read further about the longlist of 13 books here. The shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday, April 18. The winning title will be announced on Tuesday, May 23, 2023.
You can read an interview with Julia Sanches about translating Boulder at the Above The Treeline website here.
May 23, 2023
‘Boulder’ is brilliant. Nothing short of.
Baltasar/Sanches are clearly a formidable team. The prose/translation is stunning, haunting, at times desolate and yet still manages to retain the dark wit of Baltasar’s first title in this triptych.
It reads quite differently to ‘Permafrost’, and certainly would work as a standalone title if you haven’t yet read the first. (Though Permafrost is wonderful too, so you really should.)
Both titles in this triptych have so far exceeded expectations, and so I’m eagerly awaiting the English translation of the third!
Baltasar/Sanches are clearly a formidable team. The prose/translation is stunning, haunting, at times desolate and yet still manages to retain the dark wit of Baltasar’s first title in this triptych.
It reads quite differently to ‘Permafrost’, and certainly would work as a standalone title if you haven’t yet read the first. (Though Permafrost is wonderful too, so you really should.)
Both titles in this triptych have so far exceeded expectations, and so I’m eagerly awaiting the English translation of the third!
August 11, 2020
Libro corto con un enfoque que no suelo leer y que también me ha gustado.
Este segundo libro de Eva Baltasar, dedicado a las mujeres, cuyas protagonista es lesbiana como en Permafrost -el primero de la serie-, se tratan las relaciones de pareja y la maternidad.
A través dela voz de Boulder, la única narradora de esta historia, conoceremos a ambas mujeres, su carácter y personalidad, lo que representa esa relación de pareja que se ve alterada por la maternidad. Cómo lo afronta cada una de ellas desde puntos de vista muy dispares. Es una voz que narra, sin juicios de valor, solo sentimientos. Somos nosotr@s l@s lectores l@s que pensamos, juzgamos o no y sacamos nuestras conclusiones.
A pesar de ser dos mujeres en todo momento me ha transmitido la sensación de una relación de pareja donde no importaba el género. Las reacciones y sentimientos son completamente extrapolables a una relación heterosexual. La dependencia afectiva, el deseo, la evolución de una relación.
Y a pesar de la dureza, la autora consigue que la escena determinante no resulte violenta. Es un shock. ¡Me tocó leerlo dos veces!.
Las escenas sexuales son mucho más explicitas que en Permafrost.
Este libro ha sido una lectura conjunta que ha generado un gran intercambio de opiniones. El libro me ha gustado, pero el debate sobre el libro, aún más.
Valoración: 8,25/10
Lectura: Agosto 2020
Este segundo libro de Eva Baltasar, dedicado a las mujeres, cuyas protagonista es lesbiana como en Permafrost -el primero de la serie-, se tratan las relaciones de pareja y la maternidad.
A través dela voz de Boulder, la única narradora de esta historia, conoceremos a ambas mujeres, su carácter y personalidad, lo que representa esa relación de pareja que se ve alterada por la maternidad. Cómo lo afronta cada una de ellas desde puntos de vista muy dispares. Es una voz que narra, sin juicios de valor, solo sentimientos. Somos nosotr@s l@s lectores l@s que pensamos, juzgamos o no y sacamos nuestras conclusiones.
A pesar de ser dos mujeres en todo momento me ha transmitido la sensación de una relación de pareja donde no importaba el género. Las reacciones y sentimientos son completamente extrapolables a una relación heterosexual. La dependencia afectiva, el deseo, la evolución de una relación.
Y a pesar de la dureza, la autora consigue que la escena determinante no resulte violenta. Es un shock. ¡Me tocó leerlo dos veces!.
Las escenas sexuales son mucho más explicitas que en Permafrost.
Este libro ha sido una lectura conjunta que ha generado un gran intercambio de opiniones. El libro me ha gustado, pero el debate sobre el libro, aún más.
Valoración: 8,25/10
Lectura: Agosto 2020
May 17, 2023
Somewhere along the way I fell out of love with the writing style and lost interest in the story. With everything that happened, I was pretty bored for most of the book. I went in thinking it would be a quick read, but it was a struggle to keep reading to the end. It also felt bogged down with similes and metaphors that didn’t really add anything.
March 25, 2020
3.5. Em segueix encantant com escriu Baltasar i em segueix fallant la història, però millor que Permagel.
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