Eva Baltasar’s Boulder is among the six titles shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize. Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, it has every making of a winner. The 112-page novella begins with the narrator, a queer woman who’s often mistaken for a man, seeking love.
A cook on a merchant ship in Chile, she is desperate for a partner as loneliness and sexual depravity gnaws at her. Soon after, a chance meeting with a geologist, Samsa, makes her fall in love, move to Iceland, and settle into a stable life. But the calm doesn’t last long. Samsa wants a child. It is from this point in the narrative that the readers are let in into these women’s distinct experiences of mother-hood, ageing as queer adults, and the many questions of loyalty and freedom in love.
The title of the story is guttural. Boulder is what Samsa calls the narrator, in jest, when they have sex, and also to describe what her body feels like after, a joke that takes a solemn turn as the book progresses. As the pregnancy nears the end, the image of the titular rock is revealed in Samsa too––a woman with a swollen belly.
But the weight of the title is most conspicuous, as the author shows, in the relationship between the two women—sometimes, a steady rock to hold together, and at other times, one that refuses to budge. The child that “knocked her down” is the eventual boulder that makes the narrator “think of all the words that have gone over me like hedges or weeds. Among them, one that’s harder and older than any other in the world: mother”.
Baltasar’s portrayal of motherhood, in all its disgust and fineries, stands out as a much-needed commentary on a woman’s life that has been reduced to sacrifice and endurance. Of course, the author isn’t disrespectful of all that mothers have to give up because of societal pressures. After all, Samsa
“has sacrificed her own self-worth for the well-being of a child”.
Motherhood, however, has affected the narrator as well. From hating the prospect of parenting, seeing Samsa suffer physically with repeated injections, to being sexually deprived yet again, she finally admits, “I don’t like my life.” Through her characters, Baltasar questions the very essence of motherhood––its necessity, and the inevitable rupture women are subjected to in a setup that is largely patriarchal and heterosexual. It’s an achievement in
fiction that’s rare.
Whether or not it was intended through Samsa’s name, Baltasar’s work evokes the sense of an existential crisis similar to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), in which Gregor Samsa mutates into a huge insect. In Boulder too, the transformation of the characters and the dread that follows takes centre stage. From an ambitious woman to withdrawing into the private life of a mother, Samsa is “someone else, someone moved by a sense of duty... a parasite that has usurped her”. And the narrator is left wondering if she herself is a woman at all, for she feels nothing like a mother. Boulder is a love story where lovers don’t fight for or over each other. The conflict is often with themselves, between who they want to be and who they actually are.
It is in the evocative prose of Sanches’s translation that makes the short book a comforting read, despite its heavy subjects. There’s no word that feels misplaced. Every sentence has a measure to it, reflecting the author’s poetic genius. The novella is a reminder of how less is more.