#eva baltasar

[propertiesofjoy]

boulder, eva baltasar

[the-sappho-of-lesbos]

“Self-medication is a permanent temporary solution, like the low-watt bulb hanging in the hall. Twenty years with a dimly lit hall - how little it takes to become used to seeing so little.”

Permafrost, by Eva Baltasar (translated by Julia Sanches )

[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)

[dare-g]

Books 11-20 of the year 📚

[wavesketcher-sq]

for my sapphic girlies,

I’ve read two GREAT gay gay gay books in January that I just need to rec:

Boulder by Eva Baltasar (translated from Catalan)

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

The writing!???? The sex scenes!???? My my my.

; also, much frustration watching S2 of XO, Kitty and skipping all scenes from anyone who wasn’t gay/indulging in gay thoughts xoxo

[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

[epistolaire-livre]

Boulder (2020), Eva Baltasar, p. 12.

[samyaspeaks]

The protagonist, “Boulder”, is a cook on a merchant ship and develops a passionate relationship with a Scandinavian woman on the shore. Trouble in Paradise begins when they move in to Iceland and her partner wants to have a baby. Despite not sharing the same desire, our narrator finds, much to her horror, the changed demeanor of her lover and the difficulty in coping with it in a foreign land. This is my introduction to Catalan literature and I’m in love with Eva Baltasar’s writing. She wastes no words by beading beautiful similes into sentences that sound as if those are coming out of a melancholic songbird on a full-moon night. The story explores the conflict between the passion for a person and the personal freedom we crave. It’s sexy and sad and refreshing. It illustrates how motherhood can be perceived differently by two women. The only thing that I found bothersome was how short the book was and how little we see of the two characters. I really wished if we could get into the life of Samsa and Boulder in detail before they met each other so I could root more for them. 4.7/5 ⭐ 

[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

[mandabookcorner]

I can give anything up, because nothing is going essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.

- Eva Baltasar, Boulder

[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)

[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 🤌🤌🤌

[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

[lesbianboyfriend]

It's much more rewarding to fight against myself than it is to struggle with facts and events. The outside world is a monster with as many heads as there are people that I love and fear. It doesn't care that I'm suffering; it snatches me up and gobbles me down, though not before chewing me to pieces first. The outside world is an acid-filled bathtub, an enormous stomach. The days dissolve into it, and I live each one in the state of emergency that accompanies a storm; one second they've defeated me, the next I feel like I have them under control.

boulder, eva baltasar

[epistolaire-livre]

Boulder (2020), Eva Baltasar, p. 61.