Translated by Julia Sanches
Review by Michael Eaude
Ice and Fire
Mammoth is the third novel in Eva Baltasar’s big-selling trilogy, each featuring young women in search of love with other women and of means of survival in an unjust society. After Boulder, the second in the trilogy, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023, the arrival of Mammoth this autumn has been accompanied by high publicity. Leïla Slimani wrote: ‘Eva Baltasar condenses the sensations and experiences of a dozen novels into just over a hundred pages of vibrant prose.’ Pedro Almodóvar believes she is: ‘A powerful and very original author.’ For Fernanda Melchor, ‘Eva Baltasar turns intimacy into a wild adventure.’ The Guardian talks of the book’s ‘joyous eroticism’ (I did wonder if the reviewer had actually read the book) and the New York Times Book Review found that: ‘The language of desire never stops vibrating off the page.’ The publisher, the excellent Sheffield-based And Other Stories, even paid for a third-of-a-page advert in the London Review of Books.
Over 20 years I have reviewed numerous novels written in Catalan and translated to English. Usually one has to argue and push for just a little space, please, for the rich literature from this minority language of a stateless nation. Eva Baltasar’s book has received unprecedented publicity for a Catalan novel in English translation. So, does the book live up to the hype?
All three novels in the trilogy are told in the first person by young lesbians dealing with sex and motherhood in an unwelcoming world. Permafrost, the first book, tackles suicide. In one passage the main character refrains from leaping off a tall building because she imagines that, when she is lying dead below, crows might pluck out her eyes before the emergency services arrive. This off-kilter reasoning seasoned with a memorable image is characteristic of all three novels. Boulder, the best in my view, describes a passionate relationship and tackles the painful conundrum: As I love her, I’ll do anything to please my beloved; but if I do something I don’t want to do only to please her, then I end up unhappy, resentful and out of love. It is a novel that starts in freezing Patagonia and ends in freezing Iceland, with a red-hot love affair in the middle. Baltasar adores ice and fire.
The motif of this third book Mammoth is a woman who wants to get pregnant. She organises a party where she hopes to get fertilised by some random man. She finds one, but he insists on using a condom. In fact, in this short novel this lesbian is not very successful: she has sex with four men and, despite trying, with no women. Sex in Baltasar is frequent; desire drives her characters. But in Mammoth sex does not coincide with desire. Baltasar leaves little to the imagination: body fluids, small penises, dry vaginas, dildos, stained knickers, masturbation. The sex is as alienating to this reader as to the book’s main character, reminiscent curiously of Henry Miller’s mechanical descriptions. Yet the book is gripping in its portrayals of feeling: nothing like Henry Miller.
The nameless first-person narrator is enraged at the world. Jobs are crap (though she throws up a career in sociology research), housing is too expensive, food is poisoned, noise assails her: “Everything seemed to annoy me”. The world is ugly and she is living permanently on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She does a whole series of menial jobs. None lasts more than a few days. “When I worked for someoneelse, I gave them the most precious thing I had…: my dignity”. Here my rather conservative reaction was: ‘Oh come on, nameless narrator. Everyone has to work’. Baltasar, though, is not interested in a conventional heroine. Physically and mentally, her characters live on the margins. In a rather obvious analogy, Baltasar compares “the cave”, i.e. the shared flat where her narrator lives and avoids her fellow residents, with the cages of Barcelona zoo opposite her flat. To conserve her dignity, to avoid being trapped, the narrator has to flee.
Mammoth is divided into three parts. The first part establishes the narrator’s misery with city life. In the second part she changes radically. She flees her cage by the zoo to live in the country, but not just in some cosy village with a shop and internet. She ends up in deepest Catalonia, in a ruined old farm-house several kilometres from any other house. Far from the caged animals’ cries, far from flat-mates she neither knows nor talks to, she becomes more and more in touch with her animal side, as she strips away Barcelona life. “I am all unfiltered instinct, like a fallow deer or wild boar. My flesh calls to me…” . A dog (called Knock-Knock because he just turned up knocking on the door one day) shares her house and bed (comfort; no sex). She chops wood all day with an axe (nothing of the easier chainsaw the shop assistant tried to sell her) and makes herself ill. She kills old cats abandoned by immoral city people. She looks after lambs ignored by their mothers. She keeps hens. She has sex with her closest neighbour, an elderly shepherd smelling of sheep shit. “At least he’s a nice person” .
In so short a novel, Eva Baltasar packs in a whole world. Reflecting her narrator-heroine’s intensity and impulsiveness, Baltasar knows how to draw vivid scenes in few words. When a foul-smelling hunter walks past her house, the narrator invites him in for a beer. He refuses. “My despair reeks worse than the filth of his skin and all the filth of the world rolled together” . Alone, friendless, wanting to get pregnant, she lives more and more in the wild and wildly. She is lucid about everything, except about protecting herself. The brief, third part brings readers to a fierce conclusion.
Despite intensity and ferocity, I found a lot of unexpected comedy in the writing. Above, I mention a lesbian trying to get pregnant but finding that the man insists on a condom. A lesbian having sex with four men and being rejected by two women is a bitterly comic motif running right through the book. There is a great scene where a hiker pitches his tent outside the narrator’s house. She invites him in for food and drink. “We fucked right there, against the wall, crawling along the kitchen floor”. He wants to stay the night. She says no. Here’s a decisive way of dealing with a man who doesn’t know that No is No! She grabs a burning log from the hearth and, helped by Knock-Knock, assaults him. He flees, his jacket smouldering, leaving his tent behind and screaming “Crazy bitch”. I bet Baltasar loved writing this violent and comic scene. “I chased the asshole to the front door, burning strips off his jacket” . Her narrator really is a “crazy bitch”!
I felt that Baltasar was at times straining for effect. Look at this: “I woke around sundown, when the smooth quiet formed a slope down which the lions’ ancient, roaring sorrows would soon roll”. Or this: chickens “hopping about… like miniature dinosaurs”. There are several such over-written passages or forced images. That said, most critics praise her ‘poetic imagery’ – though this perhaps is because most critics know that Baltasar had published ten prize-winning poetry books before the success of Permafrost in 2018. For me, her best descriptions (most of them) crackle with intensity that is direct and realistic. Poetry should not be confused with fancy images.
Mammoth is a novel very much of today’s late capitalism, when the future is dire, jobs are precarious, housing is out of reach for the young and hope is dying. It is more, though, than just a cry of despair. Baltasar’s is powerful, visceral, high-voltage writing; and Julia Sanches transmits it faithfully to English. Mammoth is no calm, detailed dissection of bourgeois lives common to (too) many a novel. It is a furious dissection without anaesthetic of a fragile, bold woman.
Does it live up to the hype? Well, no, but what could? It is, though, a good intense book. A wild ride.
Michael Eaude has lived between Barcelona and the hills of Valencia for thirty years. He is the author of several books including Catalonia: A Cultural History and Triumph at Midnight in the Century: A Critical Biography of Arturo Barea. He has written for the Guardian, Literary Review and Socialist Review. His website can be found here: www.michaeleaude.com.
Eva Baltasar, Mammoth (And Other Stories, 2024). 9781916751002, 144pp.. paperback original.
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