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 f…