Book Review: Boulder by Eva Baltasar (translated by Julia Sanches)

My Rating: 4.5⭐

“Life develops without overwhelming me, it squeezes into every minute, it implodes; I hold it in my hands. I can give anything up, because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.”

We meet our unnamed protagonist, loner content with moving from job to job, while she waits for a merchant freighter on the Chilean coast where she takes up the job as a cook, perfectly happy with the monotonous, predictable routine while traversing the South American coast. When she meets Samsa, a Scandinavian geologist, she trades in her itinerant lifestyle for a relatively more domestic arrangement in Reykjavik where Samsa gets a job.

“She doesn’t like my name, and gives me a new one. She says I’m like those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element. No one knows where they came from. Not even they understand how they’re still standing and why they never break down.”

As the years progress, “Boulder” as Samsa calls her sees herself making compromises, adjusting to life as a couple, some aspects of it more challenging than others- but prioritizing her relationship with Samsa over all she misses from her solitary life. However, the dynamic in their relationship begins to shift when Samsa expresses her desire to have a child, to have a family – a desire that Boulder does not share and a journey that Boulder is more than reluctant to embark upon. With the birth of their child, the gap between them – both in terms of physical intimacy and emotional connection begins to broaden. Samsa’s devotion to their daughter Tinna leaves our narrator feeling lost, lonely and “in exile”. We follow Boulder as she deals with conflicting feelings of emptiness, her desire for physical connection, moments of fondness for their daughter and her need for the solitary life she has left behind.

“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.”

Boulder by Eva Baltasar (translated by Julia Sanches) is a brutally honest, unflinching yet insightful novella that takes us deep into not only the complexities of relationships – the changing dynamics, the power play, but also how we evolve as individuals in the course of the same. Narrated in the first person, and at barely one hundred pages, this is a heavy read one that will raise some important questions on how we perceive relationships, motherhood and commitment – and the lengths we go to preserve those relationships we hold dear and the extent to which we are willing to lose ourselves in the interest of the same. I could not put this down. Boulder is passionate, intense and real, too real at times. You can feel the pressure building from the very first page and the author’s writing is powerful and able to convey our narrator’s suffocation and claustrophobia with skill and much emotional depth. Even though it might be difficult to sympathize with our protagonist all the while, the author allows us to understand her. It is commendable that not only does the author not resort to stereotypes but in fact, shatters quite a few!

“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.”

I’m eager to read the remaining books in the author’s triptych. This is the second book, but all of them can be read as standalone.