“A powerful and very original author. I would love to adapt Boulder.” —Pedro Almodóvar
“Over the holidays, I gifted the lapsed readers in my life three novels—all short, recent (allowing my malingering readers to justify them as a kind of “news,” which, of course, they are), and, most important, irresistible [...] Eva Baltasar’s Boulder, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, is the most recent of the three—a ragged, sensuous story. Here you will meet a gorgeously untethered woman wondering just what to do with her freedom. A book about new life for a new year.” —Parul Seghal, New Yorker
“The book is a modern love story – global, queer, existential in its moral hierarchies – but it is also a rumination on those two most ancient of words: lover and mother. A novel that lionizes the desire to be alone even as it recognizes the beauty and grace found within a family.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“[T]his slim, visceral novel power gains power from its subversive blurring of maternal intuition and its queering of parenthood.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“Boulder is a sensuous, sexy, intense book. Baltasar condenses the sensations and experiences of a dozen more ordinary novels into just over one hundred pages of exhilarating prose. An incisive story of queer love and motherhood that slices open the dilemmas of exchanging independence for intimacy.” —International Booker Prize judging panel
“Through such intricate writing, in Julia Sanches’s voraciously readable translation, the author deftly manages to elevate the idea of a relationship to a force of nature, with the character of Boulder representing the struggle to reconcile a desire to be alone with a desire for company.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Amid sexual trysts and growing tensions, Boulder searches for the mysterious sweet spot between her wants: freedom and connection. Baltasar has an innate talent for stretching the complexities of queer lives and predicaments into undulating adventure and tension.” —The Face
“In barely 100 pages, Catalan author and acclaimed poet Eva Baltasar has crafted a gem of a novella: sharp-edged, uncompromising and utterly compelling … Boulder is for everyone: a hard-hitting, incisive triumph.” —New Internationalist
“[T]he language of desire never stops vibrating off the page; Baltasar pans the mundane for gold, and offers those nuggets—these morsels of intimacy—in a way that grips and sates.” —New York Times Book Review
“Eva Baltasar’s Boulder deftly demonstrates fiction’s ability to elide the passage of time. . . . a thoroughly compelling work.” —Words Without Borders Watchlist
“[T]his slim, visceral novel power gains power from its subversive blurring of maternal intuition and its queering of parenthood.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“The book is a modern love story—global, queer, existential in its moral hierarchies—but it is also a rumination on those two most ancient of words: lover and mother. A novel that lionizes the desire to be alone even as it recognizes the beauty and grace found within a family.” —Kirkus Starred Review
“Exquisite, dark and unconventional, Eva Baltasar turns intimacy into a wild adventure.” —Fernanda Melchor
“Boulder’s action spans more than eight years, but the reader never feels the passage of that time . . . Everything here has an air of immediacy, yet at the same time one has the feeling that there are abysses yawning between every short sentence, ellipses that expand and beg to be filled in by the reader’s own imagination. Boulder is a work of incandescent, volcanic brevity and density.” —Nuvol
“Opposed to all family ties, and jealous of her partner’s child, our narrator refuses to resign herself to her new role of secondary character in her own story, and lashes out by drinking and engaging in clandestine sex with other women, much as would a character in a Charles Bukowski story (an author with whom Baltasar shares more than one stylistic affinity). With Boulder, Eva Baltasar goes beyond Permafrost, to the point that, as with Gillian Flynn's antiheroines, or the anti-superheroine Jessica Jones, the new femininity evokes the old masculinity.” —El Periódico
“Eva Baltasar amazed me last year [with Permafrost], and my conversion has been now been completed.” —Libros y Literatura
“In her second novel, Baltasar continues to work on her approach to the body, seen as the very substance of storytelling. Around bodies, considered both as sexual objects and as the medium through which our feelings must be expressed, she is building anew a language by which human beings may, in our era, be able to approach one another.” —Zenda libros
“Baltasar returns with the same expressiveness and lyricism as in Permafrost, but with a new complexity in her characters, addressing such vital issues such as motherhood and our increasing inability to communicate with one another—an epidemic in our era.” —Valencia Plaza
Bookseller praise
“Again it manages to be incredibly powerful and pack so much punch into such a slim volume. Absolutely wonderful.” —David Coates, Blackwells Manchester
“If you like lyrical slice-of-life prose and a melancholic look at relationships, I cannot recommend Boulder enough!” —Red Newsom, Blackwells Manchester
“So, Boulder is going straight to the pile of my favourite books of 2022.” —Giulia Lenti, Foyles CXR
“God, I love Eva Baltasar’s writing. Boulder is another masterpiece from one of Europe’s most radical queer writers. I continue to be a Julia Sanches stan.” —Gary Perry, Foyles CXR
“This is a tender, unflinchingly honest examination of a woman’s desires as she grapples with the challenges and obligations of partnership and motherhood, juxtaposed against her longing for personal freedom. It’s clear that Baltasar is first and foremost a poet – every sentence is fluid and beautifully crafted (and impressively translated by Julia Sanches), to create a gorgeously sensuous and evocative reading experience.” —Nichole Gadras, Mr Bs
Praise for Permafrost
“Unconventional and refreshing ... utterly unforgettable” —New York Times
“In one sentence, Baltasar and translator Julia Sanches summon not only a literal instance of sex involving food play, not only sex between women in the abstract, but the joyful eroticism of words and reading ... queerness can be a salvation. Permafrost shows this beautifully.” —The Guardian
“Quickly, Baltasar’s narrator renders the world and herself within it in acute and savage terms . . . Baltasar is in incredible hands with Sanches, who hits each unexpected beat with deft clarity and concision . . . Definitively and rapidly, Permafrost takes readers the entire way.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
★ 2022-05-25
An inveterate loner gives up her cherished solitude for the lure of love but finds that “the strength of family ties” may bind too tightly.
When we first meet the narrator of this tightly controlled meditation on sensuality, passion, and duty, she is squatting alone in the rain waiting for the freighter that will take her away from her temporary job as a mess-hall cook at an isolated camp on the Chilean coast and into an uncertain future. Taciturn, self-reliant, and stubborn, our narrator has come to the tip of the world in search of “true zero,” a place where she can stop “pretend[ing] life had a structure.” Though her three-month contract at the camp has ended, she refuses to return to the “devastating possibility of the same old job” and instead signs on as the freighter’s cook, spending the next few years traveling up and down the South American coast. This itinerant life satisfies with its repetitive labor, its lack of expectations beyond the immediate needs of the body, the beauty of its vistas that can be appreciated from afar; but then our narrator meets Samsa, a young Icelandic woman with “white-blonde hair [and] swimmer’s shoulders,” in a port city cafe and falls in instant lust. Her feelings are reciprocated, and she soon becomes involved in an elliptical relationship with Samsa, who renames her Boulder after the “large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element.” When Samsa accepts a position in Reykjavík, Boulder moves there with her and tries to settle into a landlocked life, rocked only by the swells of her passion for her lover. Samsa, however, wants to expand and solidify their family with a little yellow house on the outskirts of the city and a baby whose arrival will erase everything that came before but replace it with nothing as solid as “the strength of [the] family ties” that Samsa so fondly imagines for them. Boulder’s emotional isolation coupled with the poetic intensity of her sexuality makes her a striking character, unique in action and in thought, and the prose lilts in truly surprising ways as it navigates the plot’s more familiar tropes of love and desire, dedication and alienation. The book is a modern love story—global, queer, existential in its moral hierarchies—but it is also a rumination on those two most ancient of words: lover and mother.
A novel that lionizes the desire to be alone even as it recognizes the beauty and grace found within a family.
