Boulder is another portrait of a woman, the second of a triptych.
The narrator of Permafrost never quite cut the strings of family, choosing the path(s) of least resistance, while lamenting not having made more independent choices in her formative years.
Assured Prose Who Art in Metaphor
If the narrator of Permafrost is somewhat unsure, that of Boulder is more certain. The prose is assured, the narrative has pace, the protagonist moves towards what suits her, to freedom – until things change.
The avid descriptions and bold metaphors have me rereading and highlighting passages, like the creation of foam as a wave crashes on itself, they are as natural to the text as the paragraphs within which they roll.
An itinerant cook, she moves from place to place, island to ship, working in the kitchen. Life on the cargo ship suits her, she’s at home in turbulent seas, around those that neither desire nor reject her, a place where there was no need to pretend life had a structure. Rootless, drifting and free.
Freedom In Its Many Forms
I think I’ve discovered what happiness is: whistling the moment you wake up, not getting in anyone’s way, owing no explanations, and falling into bed at daybreak, body addled from exhaustion, and mind free of every last trace of bitterness and dust.
The boat sails up and down the coast of Chile, she rarely disembarks, the only temptation in Chaitén, for a hot shower, fresh linen, and a lurking lust for a lover. That’s where she meets Samsa.
I look at her and she fills every corner of me. My gaze is a rope that catches her and draws her in. She looks up, sees me. She knows.
They begin to see each other, though it is often months between visits. Her lover renames her Boulder.
She doesn’t like my name and gives me a new one. She says I’m like one of those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element. No one knows where they came from. Not even they understand why they are still standing and why they never break down. I tell her I’ve seen rocks like those in the middle of the ocean.
Compromise, Commitment, Cohabitation
Samsa leaves for Iceland and asks Boulder to join her, she says yes. Samsa makes decisions and Boulder adapts to them. She observes the island, the islanders, the things she doesn’t like, she finds work that gives her an escape. She observes the different way they love each other, the pull of the boats when she walks the dock alone at night.
There’s a restlessness. She starts her own business, a food truck, no boss, no employees, a small but significant and necessary freedom. Something of her own. A coping mechanism.
Then it happens. Samsa wants to have a baby, Boulder knows that refusing her will mean the end, so asks for more time.
The novel charts this turning point in the relationship, where one woman will become pregnant and give birth while the other tries to support and be part of something she does not feel.
It is an alternative navigation of an age old dilemma, seen through the lens of a queer relationship, a couple struggling with avoidance issues.
It’s not difficult to imagine where it is headed, or what might happen, when one person isn’t quite committed to the idea and desires freedom so strongly. Is the love of another enough sufficient when events propel their lives forward faster than the communication of important feelings around them?
Boulder’s observations and experience are like that of an outsider who can’t quite enter the familiar, of trying to overcome an obstacle of the mind, when the heart is resisting, when self destructive tendencies threaten to communicate what the voice has been unwilling or unable to.
“My protagonists are mirror images of myself, only more precise and always veiled. I try to discover who they are by writing, travelling to their darkest, most uncomfortable corners, which is like travelling to the darkest corners of myself, corners that are often repressed and at times denied wholesale. Being able to embark on this journey aboard a novel is as exciting as it is unsettling. It’s as if the novel had transformed into a caravel and the seas were vast but finite, teeming with monsters on the edge of the earth.” Eva Baltasar
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.
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).
Word by Word 