BOULDER By Eva Baltasar,
Simon & Schuster, Rs 399
The Booker-shortlisted novella, Boulder, by the acclaimed Catalan poet, Eva Baltasar, is the second in an unnamed trilogy that seeks to tell the stories of three women and their struggles to conform to heteropatriarchal expectations. The aforesaid expectations are, unsurprisingly, subjected to biting social satire and frame the lesbian protagonists’ frustration with the world. The first of the series, the prize-winning novelistic debut, Permagel (2018), translated into English by Julia Sanches as Permafrost (2021), features an unnamed, young art historian’s quest for self-actualisation through intense flirtations with sex, books, and death. The third, Mamut (2022, not yet published in English), has its doctoral student in sociology — who entertains men because she wants to get pregnant — leave city life and retreat to an isolated, bucolic (and possibly bestial) existence that is practically as primordial as the novel’s titular mammoth.
Boulder is the midway point in this triptych of radicalism, renunciation, and reproduction that suggests as its telos a recursion to the state of nature, bloody in tooth and claw. The title is the nickname given to the first-person narrator by her Scandinavian geologist partner, Samsa, because she reminds her of the “large solitary rocks in southern Patagonia […] isolated and exposed to every element.” Boulder leads a free-flowing life, taking up short-term cooking contracts since she abhors “[t]he devastating possibility of the same old job, of a tiny room in a suburban apartment, of lovers as fleeting as shooting stars.” Her body, nevertheless, “rails” at her, demanding “another body to touch and stimulate and use to satisfy its own monstrous hunger — until that person, her purity, her charms are used up and spat out.” Then, in classic romantic tradition, she meets Samsa.
Samsa’s charms are so persuasive that Boulder gives up her itinerant existence, moves to Reykjavik and settles down for the next eight years in a suburban, two-storied house. When Samsa wants a child, Boulder, once again, acquiesces unwillingly, feeling “like I’ve drunk arsenic.” Inevitably the relationship breaks down, but Boulder manages to find an anchor in the baby: “I’m not interested in the web of daily obligations that ensnares Tinna, all I want is to spend time with her […] I won’t be boarding any other boats, at least for now.”
Despite the heroic efforts of the translator, Julia Sanches, Boulder sounds like a man going through a midlife crisis, with lots of imagery on top: her only concession to femaleness is a need for tampons. She (or is it he?) fetishises women, both in private thought and in interactions with her drinking buddy, Ragnar, in ways that would break out your average feminist in hives. For instance, she kneads empanada dough to avoid feeling “the hips, the ass, the breasts, the perfect flesh of a woman beneath my hands.”
Boulder’s obsession with Samsa is as all-consuming as Samsa’s for the market-driven process of assisted reproduction. Boulder describes the pregnant body in animal, monstrous, and parasitic terms, invoking the Kafkaesque absurdities signalled by Samsa’s name. She thinks Samsa doesn’t quite “get” her. The incomprehension is mutual. Consequently (not-Gregor) Samsa — the inscrutable, silent and alien object of desire — seems irredeemably opaque and frivolous. Samsa’s conventional desires are not only unworthy but also trivially feminine (pregnancy “spoils” her), and her high-paying job and privileged lifestyle are a threat to Boulder’s agonised lust for freedom.
In the end, it seems that Boulder simply ventriloquizes her creator. Baltasar remains content to merely express a certain kind of mind instead of probing it through the craft of language. In this semi-narcissistic performance in which “nothing is essential,” the novelist renounces depth of understanding, which is perhaps one of the most precious gifts of literary poiesis.
