A Poet’s Prose

On the back page in the first sentence that describes the author, it says Eva Baltasar has published ten volumes of poetry. Permafrost is her debut novel, the first in a triptych which aims to explore the universes of three different women in the first person. It clear from the beginning this is the prose of an assured poet.

I love the title, Permafrost. That deep, but necessary layer in the earth, cold and hard, it creates a foundation layer and stability, as long as conditions remain the same. Kathleen Jamie writes about it in her excellent essay collection Surfacing.

The narrator of Permafrost destabilises the reader on the opening page, with these opening lines…

It’s nice, up here. Finally. That’s the thing about heights: a hundred metres of vertical glass. I’ve settled on an edge, I live on this edge and wait for the moment when I’ll leave the edge, my temporary home.

Not only thinking about heights, but observing all the minutae that surrounds her. It seems like a suicide attempt, a theme that recurs throughout the 122 page novella, only she appears to be distracted by an ever present curiosity around the details of the new experience, something that seems incongruent with wishing to take a life.

I’ve settled on an edge, I live on this edge and wait for the moment when I’ll leave the edge, my temporary home.

Living On the Edge Creates Curiosity

The Thomas Bernhard epigram warns us ‘To be born is to be unhappy, he said, and as long as we live we reproduce this unhappiness.’

So I am surprised by the humour. Despite her melancholy nature and existential awareness, the living in the shadow of family, she makes us laugh.

She tells us her family all self-medicate. Not her, she prefers the edge.

Not for me though – best to keep moving wildly to the edge, and then decide. After a while, you’ll find that the edge gives you room to live, vertical as ever, brushing up against the void. Not only can you live on it, but there are even different ways of growing there. If surviving is what’s it all about, maybe resistance is the only way to live intensely. Now, on this edge, I feel alive, more alive than ever.

A promising child, her first crisis is graduation, after five years, there’s nowhere to go, few clues as to how to put this learning to use. So she lives in her Aunt’s apartment and rents out rooms to different women, providing herself an income and an effortless source of lovers. She spends her days reading, observing, pondering death, too curious to pursue it.

Birth and Children are Grounding

Her meandering is interrupted by her pregnant sister and her mother, their insistence to stay close, involved, drawing her back in, keeping her that person she was. The Aunt’s phone call, she’s selling the apartment.

An au pair in Scotland, a marriage proposal in Belgium, childhood memories, fantasies, churning through relationships, occasionally one that lasts a chapter, dialogue with the sister, the mother.

A mole grows and changes form, she makes a doctor’s appointment then cancels it for a year, then follows up.

Life Can Be Insistent

Each chapter is less than two pages, sometimes the narrative skips a chapter and picks up the thread again later on. It’s an inner voyage of discovery and an outer journey of experiences to unravel what was formed by others and discover the essence of, to know who she is. As that realisation occurs, life throws an even greater challenge and responsibility her way.

I’ve realised I know myself by heart…

It is a unique work, recognisably the work of a poet, unruly, impulsive, it makes light of heavy subjects, never quite proselytising, both giving into and resisting convention, forging a way through, trying different things on, breaking out and being pulled back in. One is left wondering if she is floating with the tide or pushing through it.

Permafrost received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for the Prix Médici for Best Foreign Book in France (2020).

Next up, book 2 in the triptych, Boulder, which was recently shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023.