Mammoth’s protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She’s inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work – all in pursuit of life in the raw. This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar’s wild voice.
Luke Kennard
Daily Telegraph five-star review
‘Eva Baltasar’s scintillating novel Mammoth, in which a woman rejects society for simple life and sensual joy, has intelligence and force.’
The Bookseller
‘The Catalan author’s intense prose seizes you from the first page of this short explosive novel.’
Publishers Weekly
‘In the pulsing latest from Baltasar (Boulder), a Barcelona lesbian attempts to forge a new life in the Catalan countryside. The unnamed narrator, 24, is disillusioned by her sociology research job at a university (“Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime”), and hopes to sate her feeling of emptiness by getting pregnant (“It wasn’t the desire to have a baby that took me hostage so much as the desire to gestate, to have life course through my body”). […] Baltasar’s unsettling and poignant descriptions offer a slim yet profound meditation on finding what it takes for one to feel alive. This is striking.’
Publishers Weekly
‘One of the preeminent chroniclers of queer life working today is Eva Baltasar, whose triptych of novels explores the lives of three different women who, translator Julia Sanches says, “are in the midst of trying to find their place in a world that suits them as much as a pair of too-small shoes.”’
Kirkus Reviews
‘In “a rusty old Peugeot the size of an egg carton,” [the narrator] sets off on a journey that takes her ever farther from the epicentres of human society until she ends up at Cal Llanut, an isolated farmhouse high in the mountains where she feels she will finally find the solitude she needs to live “cleaved to the rock like a root, sucking up nutrients until every finger, every tooth, every last one of [her] thoughts is worn through.” […] Ardent and intimate, a novel of physical and psychological vistas.’
Yelena Moskovich
‘An adventure of grit and philosophy in the impeccable hands of Eva Baltasar, as a swashbuckler Dante escapes the city for provincial life, and therein, enters the darkness of her revelry and disgust for humanhood. Baltasar peels words from their worn usage, giving the reader language unbearably alive and pure. Another tour de force from one of the best writers of our generation.’
Europapress
‘The title of the novel is a metaphor for the protagonist, who sees herself as a strong, powerful animal, capable of handling anything, although the author reminds us that mammoths were under threat from being hunted by the humans of the time.’
Pere Antoni Pons
‘One sensationalist way of describing Mammoth would be to call it a ferocious and brutalist version of Thoreau.’
Praise for Eva Baltasar
‘A powerful and very original author. I would love to adapt Boulder.’ Pedro Almodóvar
‘The experience of reading Permafrost is absolutely unforgettable.’ The New York Times
‘Boulder is a sensual, sexy and intense book. Eva Baltasar condenses the sensations and experiences of a dozen novels into just over a hundred pages of vibrant prose. An incisive story of queer love and motherhood, it dissects the dilemmas of trading independence for intimacy.’ Leïla Slimani, member and president of the 2023 International Booker Prize Jury
‘Exquisite, dark and unconventional, Eva Baltasar turns intimacy into a wild adventure.’ Fernanda Melchor
‘Baltasar summons the joyous eroticism of words and reading.’
‘Baltasar handles feelings like radioactive material, like something that kills us and illuminates us.’ Babelia/El País
‘Baltasar is a skilful writer. A Catalan Dorothy Parker. Ironic, relentless. La Repubblica
‘A magma of sensations, doubts and aspirations . A treasure.’ Le Monde
‘A radical novel on themes with little consensus – (homosexuality, refusal of motherhood), ‘Boulder’ is a mineral text, like these isolated rocks in the middle of the landscape.’ L’independant
‘Through such intricate writing 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.’ Times Literary Supplement
‘The language of desire never stops vibrating off the page; Baltasar pans the mundane for gold, and offers those nuggets — these morsels of intimacy — in a way that grips and sates.’ New York Times Book Review
‘Everything has an air of immediacy, and at the same time one has the feeling that between sentence and sentence abysses open, ellipses that expand and ask the imagination of the reader to fill them. Boulder is a work of incandescent, volcanic brevity and density, full of phosphorescent metaphors.’ Núvol
‘A cold but burning lucidity, admirable, in its approach to detail.’ El Cultural
‘Eva Baltasar's is a free unrestrained voice. She describes how you didn't think it could be done.’ La Vanguardia
