#eva baltasar

[a3spinto]

[propertiesofjoy]

boulder, eva baltasar

[smokefalls]

Language is and always will be an occupied territory. I have the feeling I was shackled to it the moment I was born. Only language can help you belong somewhere and make sure you don’t lose your way. It’s a nourishing underlayer that seems to live in the mind, migrate down to the mouth, and, spoken, melt on the lips. At the same time, language is everywhere, occupying the body’s farthest-flung cells, pushing them to unimaginable places. It urges you on and turns your stomach, confuses your animal instincts, makes you human. No emotion is more indulgent than feeling that you are intensely human. Though it can also be the most tyrannical. You are responsible for every word, and no statement is innocent.

Eva Baltasar, Boulder (translated by Julia Sanches)

[lesbianboyfriend]

The thought of all the words that are implanted in us when we are young horrifies me. Now I know even poetry can't neutralize them, much less subdue them.

boulder, eva baltasar

[wordshaveteeth]

Ah, the old days! The old days are always better. The present knows this and chooses to punish us out of jealousy.

- Eva Baltasar, Boulder

[phaedraismyusername]

I'm not a book awards girlie but I will say if you were considering reading anything off the Booker Prize list then I'd highly recommend Boulder by Eva Baltasar

It's a hundred-ish pages of internal monologue about what happens when a restless soul almost accidentally settles down, and how love and resentment can exist in the same space in your chest when two people don't want the same things. It's beautifully written and the way the narrative voice translates her life through her love of food and the sea is just 🤌🤌🤌

[mandabookcorner]

When I close my eyes, I’m in another world—the always perfect world of the past, which nostalgia has wiped clean of every blemish and bruise.

- Eva Baltasar, Boulder

[naberiie]

finished boulder by eva baltasar today and am a bit conflicted. i really related to the disgust the pov character, a queer woman, felt towards all things pregnancy and childbirth related. it was so genuinely refreshing to read the way the author wrote never couched that disgust or ever shamed her for it. the despair i felt while reading as the noose of her situation gradually closed in with no way out was an incredibly unique experience. and then it flipped on its head to ‘i didn’t love my child until i held it and now i want nothing more’. i recognize that it’s a subversion of a heteronormative trope, where it’s the father who feels increasingly alienated from and confused by his changing partner throughout a pregnancy but then he holds the baby and finally Gets It. i didn’t want her to get it. i wanted her to get out, with that same utterly refreshing lack of condemnation

[trumpeterswans]

"When you're twenty-three you think it's too late to do anything. Not until your forties do you realize that you still have time - not to do everything, perhaps, but at least everything that matters."

Permafrost, Eva Baltasar

[bookjotter6865]

Winding Up the Week #392

An end of week recap “No one who loves life can ignore literature, and no one who loves literature can ignore life.” – Laura Esquivel This is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look ahead to forthcoming features, see what’s on the nightstand and keep readers abreast of various book-related…

[propertiesofjoy]

boulder, eva baltasar

[smokefalls]

The power she exudes is subtle, almost tender, beautiful and supple yet resilient, like the silk of a spider’s web. She entices as much as she ensnares, lets you step back but never abandon her.

Eva Baltasar, Boulder (translated by Julia Sanches)

[lesbianboyfriend]

The yellow house waits at the end of the street. It looks tired under the streetlight, like it hasn't slept a wink. It recognizes me the moment we lock eyes, and indicts me with every last one of its windows. I realize the house is no longer a house but a wife that has grown over Samsa like a second skin that insulates and shelters her. A fresh layer of skin that wants for nothing and refuses to be touched, that wallpapers a generic name over the proper name of the woman I loved.

boulder, eva baltasar

[wordshaveteeth]

It is easier to put up a facade than it is to loosen the bolts you’ve been tightening, turn by turn, day by day, inside a house.

- Eva Baltasar, Boulder

[lyra-azalea]

“Loneliness may not make us intelligent, but it does force us to smarten up and choose life. And it imposes an enormous love of the most important kind: self-love.”

Eva Baltasar, Mammoth. Translated by Julia Sanches

[mandabookcorner]

The truth is we’d never made any plans, we’d just taken huge bites out of life.

- Eva Baltasar, Boulder