Boulder: Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize

Product Information

Finally a International Booker longlisted novel that excited me. I thought this day will not come this year.

International Booker prize reveals ‘very cool and very sexy

This is a book where you feel very close to the narrator. You don’t leave her side for a second, you feel every emotion she describes, with an extraordinary poetic force.’ An investigation of the body as an instrument for measuring pain and desire. A besieged, solemn and majestically painful body, which ideally embraces all of humanity.’ Through such intricate writing, in Julia Sanches’s voraciously readable translation, the author deftly manages to elevate the idea of a relationship to a force of nature, with the character of Boulder representing the struggle to reconcile a desire to be alone with a desire for company.’ While immersing myself into Boulder’s world, I realized that the prose was full of metaphors, similes and other figures of speech - usually I find this kind of writing quite underwhelming. Yet, after getting to know the narrator slightly better, I felt it wasn’t completely incongruous with her peculiar and detached, but deeply poetic worldview. Boulder’s raw vocabulary is her second nature, there is something addictive about her voice. An abundant marine imagery with its sea, ships and sailors hints at the bigger picture which is to take place in this novel. Boulder’s view on motherhood is rather unconventional - still a social taboo - but not less valid than any other. Challenging social and gender roles, this novel also encompasses a difficult relationship between Boulder and her partner, two women with very different priorities - which is far from common in literature. Boulder is a free spirit and a wanderer in the first place, someone who refuses to conform to social expectations and values her independence above anything else. On the other hand, I wanted to see if there were any other options available for Boulder, but having in mind this narrator’s wandering nature, her choices make sense.Permagel', d'Eva Baltasar: crònica d'un triomf editorial (Jordi Nopca)". llegim.ara.cat. June 27, 2018 . Retrieved February 3, 2019. Boulder is a study and a chronicle of a relationship gone awry. Unfortunately, none of the conclusions sounds like a revelation, more like advice from women's magazines: poor communication leads to disaster; love is a neverending project which requires engagement, devotion and time from both partners; you have to be assertive in the relationship because sacrificing your own needs leads to frustration. From the very beginning, it is obvious that despite physical dominance, it is not Boulder who sets the rules here but Samsa: She doesn’t like my name, and gives me a new one. Then more demands follow with no consideration of what Boulder thinks/wants/needs. These conclusions are never told expressis verbis, they are veiled in poetical prose but hover in the air.

Boulder | Club Editor Boulder | Club Editor

And Other Stories has given Permafrost a brilliant comp: Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation) meets Virginie Despentes (Vernon Subutex, King Kong Theory). This is poet Eva Baltasar’s first novel, in a brilliant translation by Julia Sanches.’ Time doesn’t live outside us; it comes into being as we do. To be able to hold time in our hands— now that’s a human mission.”The process of reading of a book generally takes it course through it gradually getting under skin of the reader after overcoming the reader’s initial phase of apprehension but Boulder starts with explosion, straightway blowing the readers and their minds without any superfluousness as if it rides over a sense of utmost urgency on to a quest for the ultimate truth. The narrator of the story pulls in the reader, dwindling over the tumultuous and violent waves of the sea of emotions, to the vortex of the sea wherein the heart of matter may lie, without wasting many words. Boulder takes the reader on a hot and stormy ride of sex, passion, desires and lust to sacred emotion of love, wherein we meet Samsa, whom she loves passionately so much so that she moves to her place of strange and unfamiliar surroundings in Iceland. The emptiness of solitude fills her life as if her existence takes dive in the hell of nothingness, she looks for solace in the company of other casual hook-ups, but nothing brings consolation to her soul. However, their daughter-Tinna stimulates a new sense of intimacy in her Boulder, intimacy which is strange and afresh, as if the flower may bloom again on the anew feeling of love and affection. Boulder finds herself amidst the soup of her fire of independence and the newly felt feeling of endearment, she has to churn the froth with her soul to decide the fate of her life. Setting the story in Iceland added to its atmosphere of nordic depression and must have been meant as a metaphor. The writer Eva Baltasar is known primarily as a poet, although this is the 2nd of a triptych of novels, preceded by Permagel (2018) (translated into English as Permafrost (2018)) and followed by Mamut (2022) (not yet translated into English).