Book review: “Boulder”, by Eva Baltasar

ROCK, by Eva Baltasar. Translated by Julia Sanches.

In “Boulder,” the second novel in a triptych that explores the lives of women in first person, Spanish poet and writer Eva Baltasar introduces us to an excited, chain-smoking cook working on a merchant ship off the coast of southern Chile. . Stillness comes to our restless protagonist about as easily as a rough sea until she comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who affectionately gives her the nickname “Boulder.”

Not one for structure, and likely to burst into a rash if ever handed a daily diary, Boulder ditches a life at sea for a small apartment in Reykjavik, where the couple move after Samsa accepts a job offer. As Samsa works 10 hours a day, Boulder struggles to acclimatize to the routine of a daily life that conflicts with her consoling solitude. Yet the language of desire continues to vibrate on the page; Baltasar strikes gold in the mundane and delivers those nuggets—those bits of intimacy—in a way that grips and satisfies. They are enough to make Boulder stay, even if they remove her from an unattached life.

But what happens when his love for Samsa and his desire for freedom – an already precarious balance for Boulder – collide? After almost eight years together and approaching 40, Samsa decides she wants to have a child. For their have a child. For Boulder, it’s an anchor, once dropped, that can’t be retrieved, but she’s afraid of losing Samsa. “I don’t tell her that what I want is not to be a mother.”

As Samsa prepares her body for childbirth – vitamins, hormones, injections, blood tests, childbirth classes, prenatal water aerobics – Boulder watches her partner transform into a total stranger: “There’s nothing left of her for me. , she transformed.” She begins to question her place in Samsa’s life and soothes her anxieties with Brennivín at a local pub. Samsa gives birth to a baby girl, Tinna, and Boulder finds herself outside, looking inside.

While motherhood comes naturally to Samsa, Boulder feels like the cans dragging the car of a newlywed getaway: “It has no bearing on me; I was sent into exile. The emptiness Boulder feels begins to eat away at her, and before long she is seeking solace in the company of another woman, a regular who comes to her food truck for lunch.

Their date ends when Boulder begins to feel trapped by her new lover’s demands on domestic life. At the same time, the physical closeness to Tinna—holding her, feeding her, dancing with her on the morning of the day a week when Samsa tries to put all of her spare time into it—evokes newness and strangeness, and Boulder surrenders to intimacy. Despite the displacement and disconnection suffered by a delightfully complex protagonist whose anxiety-induced witticisms would surely kill on Twitter, the novel touches your heart. Not a mother, and not one to the mother, Boulder ends up planting roots in the space between noun and verb. Motherhood changed Boulder, but not hers – and therein lies the source of this novel’s magnetism.

Baltasar, through Sanches’ translation, evokes a version of motherhood that avoids the word. Instead, it is an approximation, asking us to move away from the learned language, from the exact. And maybe he shouldn’t have a name; maybe some things – like love – are meant to be hard to define.

Greg Mania is the author of the memoir “Born to Be Public”.

ROCK, by Eva Baltasar | Translated by Julia Sanches | 112 pages | And Other Stories | Paper, $17.95