Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname 'Boulder'. When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already forty and can't bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn't know how to say no - and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien.
With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love.
Once again, Eva Baltasar demonstrates her pre-eminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world - and in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
'Boulder's action spans more than eight years, but the reader never feels the passage of that time . . . Everything here has an air of immediacy, yet at the same time one has the feeling that there are abysses yawning between every short sentence, ellipses that expand and beg to be filled in by the reader's own imagination. Boulder is a work of incandescent, volcanic brevity and density.' Nuvol 'Opposed to all family ties, and jealous of her partner's child, our narrator refuses to resign herself to her new role of secondary character in her own story, and lashes out by drinking and engaging in clandestine sex with other women, much as would a character in a Charles Bukowski story (an author with whom Baltasar shares more than one stylistic affinity). With Boulder, Eva Baltasar goes beyond Permafrost, to the point that, as with Gillian Flynn's antiheroines, or the anti-superheroine Jessica Jones, the new femininity evokes the old masculinity.' El Periodico 'Eva Baltasar amazed me last year [with Permafrost], and my conversion has been now been completed.' Libros y Literatura 'In her second novel, Baltasar continues to work on her approach to the body, seen as the very substance of storytelling. Around bodies, considered both as sexual objects and as the medium through which our feelings must be expressed, she is building anew a language by which human beings may, in our era, be able to approach one another.' Zenda libros 'Baltasar returns with the same expressiveness and lyricism as in Permafrost, but with a new complexity in her characters, addressing such vital issues such as motherhood and our increasing inability to communicate with one another - an epidemic in our era.' Valencia Plaza 'The book is a modern love story -global, queer, existential in its moral hierarchies - but it is also a rumination on those two most ancient of words: lover and mother. A novel that lionizes the desire to be alone even as it recognises the beauty and grace found within a family.' Kirkus Starred Review '[T]his slim, visceral novel power gains power from its subversive blurring of maternal intuition and its queering of parenthood.' Publisher's Weekly 'Eva Baltasar's Boulder deftly demonstrates fiction's ability to elide the passage of time. . . . a thoroughly compelling work.' Words Without Borders Watchlist '[T]he language of desire never stops vibrating off the page; Baltasar pans the mundane for gold, and offers those nuggets - these morsels of intimacy - in a way that grips and sates.' New York Times Book Review 'Through such intricate writing, in Julia Sanches's voraciously readable translation, the author deftly manages to elevate the idea of a relationship to a force of nature, with the character of Boulder representing the struggle to reconcile a desire to be alone with a desire for company.' Times Literary Supplement 'Amid sexual trysts and growing tensions, Boulder searches for the mysterious sweet spot between her wants: freedom and connection. Baltasar has an innate talent for stretching the complexities of queer lives and predicaments into undulating adventure and tension.' The Face 'In barely 100 pages, Catalan author and acclaimed poet Eva Baltasar has crafted a gem of a novella: sharp-edged, uncompromising and utterly compelling ... Boulder is for everyone: a hard-hitting, incisive triumph.' New Internationalist 'Boulder is a sensuous, sexy, intense book. Baltasar condenses the sensations and experiences of a dozen more ordinary novels into just over one hundred pages of exhilarating prose. An incisive story of queer love and motherhood that slices open the dilemmas of exchanging independence for intimacy.' International Booker Prize judging panel 'Boulders have a way of making landscapes both formidable and absurd-and Baltasar delves into this uneasy balance in Boulder, her idiosyncratic portrait of displacement across cultures and across dispositions.' Rain Taxi 'As queer in style as it is in content, Boulder is a superb follow-up to Baltasar's debut and will leave readers craving more of her exquisite storytelling.' Pop Matters 'This slim, visceral novel power gains power from its subversive blurring of maternal intuition and its queering of parenthood.' Publisher's Weekly 'The book is a modern love story - global, queer, existential in its moral hierarchies - but it is also a rumination on those two most ancient of words: lover and mother. A novel that lionizes the desire to be alone even as it recognizes the beauty and grace found within a family.' Kirkus Reviews, starred review 'Over the holidays, I gifted the lapsed readers in my life three novels-all short, recent (allowing my malingering readers to justify them as a kind of "news," which, of course, they are), and, most important, irresistible. Eva Baltasar's Boulder, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, is the most recent of the three-a ragged, sensuous story. Here you will meet a gorgeously untethered woman wondering just what to do with her freedom. A book about new life for a new year.' Parul Seghal, New Yorker
Sprache
Verlagsort
High Wycombe
Großbritannien
Produkt-Hinweis
Broschur/Paperback
Klebebindung
Maße
Höhe: 195 mm
Breite: 126 mm
Dicke: 10 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-913505-38-7 (9781913505387)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Already an acclaimed poet, with ten volumes of poetry to her name, Eva Baltasar's debut novel Permafrost received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for France's 2020 Prix Medicis for Best Foreign Book. Boulder's English translation was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize . The author lives in a Catalonian village near the mountains. Julia Sanches translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. For And Other Stories she has translated from all three languages-from the Portuguese, Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques, from the Catalan the forthcoming Permafrost by Eva Baltasar, and from the Spanish, Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernandez, for which she won a PEN/Heim award. She has also translated works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins, among others. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators' collective, and currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
