Review of Eva Baltasar’s Boulder: Love as a rock

Eva Baltasar’s Boulder: international booker shortlist

When Julia Sanches took on the challenge of translating queer poet and novelist Eva Baltasar’s  Boulder, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, she began reading books that had influenced the Catalan writer. In interviews, Sanches said she read  Motherhood by Sheila Heti and reread  Bluets by Maggie Nelson and some Carson McCullers since she is cited in the epigraph: “Love is a solitary thing.” 

Through the stories of two women, their intertwined lives, and what happens when one of them decides to have a baby, Baltasar takes readers to every corner of a woman’s mind, “corners that are often repressed and at times denied wholesale.” Like Annie Ernaux and Yuko Tsushima, fearless recorders of women’s need and desires, Baltasar is attentive to detail and even as she chronicles everyday acts and moods of her protagonists she also addresses larger questions of love and motherhood. 

It’s a slim novel, and Baltasar chooses her words carefully, right up to her choice of name for her characters. “The title came first,” she said in an interview to thebookerprizes.com, “that word was what inspired me.” Baltasar said she was driven to write  Boulder because she was fixated on the idea of getting to know a woman, through literature, who could embody a boulder; “a woman, like that isolated, solitary rock; a living metaphor at the mercy of the elements and weather, with cracks that allowed me to dig into her and uncover the secret hardness inside.” 

Boulder falls in love with Samsa, an interesting pick for a name, that could mean Kafka’s  Metamorphosis may have been on Baltasar’s mind. If Gregor Samsa wakes up one day and finds himself transformed into a gigantic insect in Kafka’s hands, Samsa in Baltasar’s words also undergoes unbelievable changes once she becomes a mother. Boulder notices it and muses: “We’ve put on weight in the space of our daily life, and now our seams are tearing stitch by stitch, exposing the shameful nakedness beneath.” 

It’s light years away from the time the two had met off the Sea Chiloé in Chile, and bonded over coffee and lemon cake and sex. Then, after they exchanged numbers, Boulder (the name given to her by Samsa because she reminds her of the solitary rocks near Patagonia), clung to her “the way lunatics embrace new beliefs or dangle from trees.” She thought about Samsa all the time: “My body is like a lab where a circle of alchemists is working on developing the ultimate rock, her light one of a million possibilities that I am obsessed by.”

But even the love that unfurls above them “like an enormous branch that bends and touches all the most sensitive, reticent parts of us” is not enough to sustain the relationship forever. For, as Boulder realises, love is a solitary thing.  

Baltasar wrote three versions of  Boulder, and deleted the first two after deciding to go with the third, a passionate journey into the darkest recesses of a woman’s mind.