Boulder: Eva Baltasar

A beautiful book from an important category of literature...

The prose - stark, full of metaphors, poetically blunt, powerful, straightforward, somehow brittle - is what makes Eva Baltasar Sarda’s Boulder (2020). The narrator/main character, a woman whose lover calls her Boulder is is a cook on a ship, happier away from people and with her own thoughts in her little world, until she falls deeply into lust/love with Samsa, a more conventional woman who is blonde, Scandinavian, and has a job that pays well. Samsa takes a job in Reykjavik, Boulder follows…Samsa wants to buy a house, Boulder would rather not do something that will tie them down in that nor something so conventiional, Samsa wants to have a child…and Samsa opts to get pregnant. As problems arise, they have sex instead of conversation. The comparison of a woman producing a child to the production of product, as a product into capital is invested and a woman’s body is merely the machinery is stunningly apt for the zeitgeist of our times. This is an unforgettable book that will linger for a long, long time.

And yes, it’s sapphic, about queer women. Something I’ve just learned: that between 2022 and 2023, seven percent of Americans that thought that gay/lesbian relationships were morally acceptable changed their minds. Only 64% of Americans now believe that lesbian/gay relationships are morally acceptable. Yet, 71% of Americans find gambling “morally accepting”. Amazing. I personally find queer relationships somewhat more beautiful, somehow more pure and loving - and the judgement of them being “wrong” is stunningly wrong and in and of itself “morally unacceptable” to me. So books like this feel more timely and more necessary than ever: to show the world that we too love, live, want to commit, and have hopes, dreams, and ambitions that are every bit as acceptable and beautiful as any straight person’s