The transfer of poetry to prose leaves in Eva Balthazar a trail like spring mowing. A trail loaded with resounding aromas of orchard and earth. In an existentialist poet like her, essences would have more to do with harvests that also pluck roots. Roots that can be of delicate crops, or even of impossible wastelands or permafrost where this author addressed her prose arrival.
The harvest is a new narrative space where Eva Baltasar sublimates forms and assaults transcendent backgrounds. Starting from a telluric presentation that serves as a metaphor for each protagonist soul awaiting its irrigation. Experiences in the first person or from unique prisms. Perspectives on the future of existence for protagonists who carry their doubts beyond inertia or concessions to customs as a thread of that normality idolized as a golden calf.
Top 3 recommended novels by Eva Baltasar
Permafrost
The end of living. The intense need for life sometimes leads to the furthest point, to the contrary. It is about that peculiar magnetism of the poles that in the end seem to be the same separate thing in its origin. A thing, an essence, a something that insistently and persistently demands the reunion of the whole range of life that its dichotomous existence could explain with rapturous lucidity.
The first-person voice of an Eva Baltasar successfully fused in a thousand poems, gives more intensity if possible to the protagonist of her story. One of those people who harbors the hope, perhaps without wanting it at all, to tune into reason and truth, in that abyss between the subjective impressions that impel happiness and a possible world objectively led towards the most abysmal unsatisfaction of all of us, travelers of a single life, as I pointed out Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Except that the protagonist of this novel is not willing to succumb to that cold of living and, clad in that permafrost with which the most inhospitable of our planet is also covered, she launches herself into the even more open hedonism of the woman to whom still he is held accountable for how he governs his body.
Life is so trivial that it is not worth dwelling on worldly concerns such as those that are submerged under ice by your family or friends. The most important thing is, under the influence that nothing is worth it, to take advantage of at least the moments with that rabid authenticity that only marks the drives freed from their painful social and moral stigmas.
The opposite pole is always there. The deep drives also include resignation, surrender, exhaustion to even undertake a new step, suicide as that last adventure in the face of being fed up with so much triviality.
An agile novel in that frantic march towards the protagonist's emptiness. A story with more than edges and troubles from which also emerges that black humor typical of someone who is back from everything. A book of extreme lucidity, with a perspective of our world as icy as the protagonist's skin.
Mammoth
Sometimes reality and fiction meet. Because beyond the depth of this story, the testimony of a woman like Beatriz Montanez, cut off from the world, it awakens quite a few analogies. But of course the search for a way out for that centripetal force that is today's society, with its disguised demands for well-being, raises as many possible stories as there are fascinating ways to tell them.
The protagonist of Mammoth She is an archaic girl trapped in modern life. His habitat is the city, where he works to live. She wants to be a mother, and this forces her to get closer to men. How can you resist the human anthill if you have the instinct of a lonely hunter?
One day she leaves the city, changes her surroundings and becomes the owner of a completely isolated house. There are only the shepherd, loneliness and beasts that feed or threaten you. Instinct works, consciousness is altered and a transformation takes place.
This is not just another novel about the flight to the countryside, this is a time bomb on the wounds of contemporary society, a narrative in growing who howls at the mercy of this savage novelist who is Eva Baltasar.
Boulder
The continuation of Permafrost took on a new reference, a similar metaphor that abounds in the idea of ​​loneliness despite everything, of latent life, of the persistent crash of the waves on a consciousness that seems to remain immovable to any shock. Until something gets it ripped off its site. And the rock drifts or perhaps sinks.
The protagonist of Boulder she makes a living as a cook on an old merchant ship. It is the perfect situation: solitude, a cabin, the ocean, some port in which to meet women and hours to face the void, to feel the force of provisionality. Until one day one of them manages to leave the sea, agrees to live within four walls and is involved in assisted pregnancy and the education of a child.
What has motherhood done with the woman you once met in a bar in Patagonia? What will she do, caged animal in a single-family house in Reykjavik? Everything has changed except its nickname, Boulder: those huge isolated stones in the middle of the landscape, exposed to everything without anyone knowing where they come from or why they are there.
If you want to have them all together, this volume brings them together:
