Adina (notifications back, log out, clear cache) 's Reviews > Boulder

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.