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.
You can now buy the novel Permafrost, Eva Baltasar's debut, here: