Eva Baltasar

The #1 Catalan bestseller and winner of the Llibreter booksellers prize, poet Baltasar's novel is a forthright study of lesbian sexuality and suicide.

Permafrost

Permafrost es el sorprendente debut de Eva Baltasar, una historia contundente, íntima y carnal de una protagonista con pulsiones suicidas que se protege del exterior pero se entrega con intensidad al sexo con otras mujeres, la literatura y el arte. El permafrost es esa capa de la tierra permanentemente congelada y es también la membrana que cubre a la protagonista de esta novela. Escrita en primera persona, nos presenta a una mujer en etapa de formación que se protege del exterior, que percibe la superficialidad en todo cuanto la rodea y huye de un entorno que nada tiene que ver con su manera de entender la vida: una madre obsesionada con la salud, omnipresente y controladora, y una hermana que afronta su existencia convencional con medicación y un positivismo irritante. La protagonista, que siente pulsiones suicidas, no permite que nadie se le acerque demasiado, pero al mismo tiempo se entrega con intensidad al sexo con otras mujeres, la literatura y el arte. El pulso entre el hedonismo, los placeres más carnales y la muerte es constante en esta novela, así como el tono mordaz de una protagonista que nos gana con su inteligencia y su humor negrísimo desde la primera página. Repleto de imágenes poéticas, contundentes y muy físicas, este carácter tan palpable del texto no es gratuito en una novela que nos habla del cuerpo, del sexo, del yo; una obra aguda y directa que reivindica la libertad femenina en el placer y en la soledad. Eva Baltasar inicia con Permafrost un tríptico de protagonistas femeninas que quiere explorar distintas etapas en la vida de las mujeres.

Chloe

It’s so painless at the end of the day. And there's so much beauty, born again in your own face, permeating the friendly halves of other people. Your senses are honed. You rediscover the sun, whose light shines all around you and falls over exteriors like geometric shapes at rest. I don’t see how this state of being can be normal. If it were, I might not be so shocked by everyone’s eagerness to go on living day after day. But nothing can possibly be so long-lasting. 

That’s when it happened, just when I seemed to have reached peak happiness: a midafternoon phone call. Midafternoon phone calls are the worst kind of phone call. There's something passionate about the catastrophe of a midnight phone call, an attempt on life by jump-starting the heart. We should all be on the receiving end of at least one midnight call a month, so that we can carry on living at another level of intensity. A mid-afternoon call, on the other hand, is a torpedo. 

genuinely a must read for everyone and a gem i’m so glad i found 

ineke

"Permafrost es el sorprendente debut de Eva Baltasar, una historia contundente, íntima y carnal de una protagonista con pulsiones suicidas que se protege del exterior pero se entrega con intensidad al sexo con otras mujeres, la literatura y el arte. El permafrost es esa capa de la tierra permanentemente congelada y es también la membrana que cubre a la protagonista de esta novela. Escrita en primera persona, nos presenta a una mujer en etapa de formación que se protege del exterior, que percibe la superficialidad en todo cuanto la rodea y huye de un entorno que nada tiene que ver con su manera de entender la vida: una madre obsesionada con la salud, omnipresente y controladora, y una hermana que afronta su existencia convencional con medicación y un positivismo irritante. La protagonista, que siente pulsiones suicidas, no permite que nadie se le acerque demasiado, pero al mismo tiempo se entrega con intensidad al sexo con otras mujeres, la literatura y el arte. El pulso entre el hedonismo, los placeres más carnales y la muerte es constante en esta novela, así como el tono mordaz de una protagonista que nos gana con su inteligencia y su humor negrísimo desde la primera página. Repleto de imágenes poéticas, contundentes y muy físicas, este carácter tan palpable del texto no es gratuito en una novela que nos habla del cuerpo, del sexo, del yo; una obra aguda y directa que reivindica la libertad femenina en el placer y en la soledad. Eva Baltasar inicia con Permafrost un tríptico de protagonistas femeninas que quiere explorar distintas etapas en la vida de las mujeres"--

‘Like love, death catches the body. So let it be caught unawares.’

C/W in review: suicidal ideation | book: self harm, suicidal ideation, erotic scenes

It is fascinating that a reader could never learn a narrator’s name and yet feel they know them intimately through the intricate patchwork of their body and mind, as if they’d known them their entire life. This review digresses with the hopeful politics of collective care which many of my previous reviews have highlighted. Instead, it wants to touch on the non-sustainability, in the long term, of current forms of care, which yearns to carve a (privatised) industry out of it without cohesive structural support from the welfare state and from social constructs. Along its disassembled narrative, PERMAFROST broaches the process of how care can easily depreciate and (re)produce moral, mental and physical injuries and transgressions.

The vignettes which compose this deliciously slim volume feel like a concatenation of knick-knacks pierced haphazardly by the thread of the narrator’s self; a poetry of pieces recovered from a garbage can, assorted things floppily and crisply abandoned. Objects can once belong and work indivisibly to an entity, but often it is exhausting to live in relation to another, despite what others may say about symbiosis, care and all the sunny ideas filling doughy hope. Our narrator is convinced relations are a ‘first-rate solvent’, and that the other person’s need for relentless reassurance is a ‘colossal effort that leaves [her] dead tired.’ Homeless and flitting between jobs, she wouldn’t have stayed to ‘comfort’ her sister — or more specifically, tolerate her sister’s queerphobic insensitivities and tiptoe around her fragile ego — in a post-heartbreak garbage mess, if it weren’t for the few days of residence and rest in her sister’s guest room. Sexual pleasure is the reason she also stays (present) in a relationship with a luxurious, simple woman whose existence dehumanises her. As society waves your life as a trophy and yet simultaneously labels your sins, you have to live with precautions and cure-seeking aid, ‘grey and unassuming like female pigeons but aggressive like mothers.’

There comes a point when extraction of our selves from humans at the right time can be the kind of medication we need. The same way with how adulthood enables extrication from passively abusive parents (and yet, not completely; for you are bound forever by life and bloodlines). All this pessimism and reluctance towards ‘care’ is inextricable from the static, disappointingly predictable ways of being — the frustrating cycle of non-reciprocity, of finding our desires unmet and unsatisfied after having given so much of us (though I guess there’s an advantage to this predictability; a precaution against our anxiety). 

Crisscrossed with triggering images, lingering sensations, much of the story bears witness to our narrator’s obsession over the materiality of death and sex. Permafrost refers to the constant fumbling, grasping feeling which haunts our narrator: the crisp ice which floats between our feet and the thickness of waters below, suspending us, a sense of exhilarating untetheredness. We cannot decide whether the waters below is the sinking relief of death or the suffocating viscosity of life.

When the permafrost cracks at an instance of warmth — from the narrator’s flings for pleasure, or rare, steadying moments of care — it commands that we moor ourselves to the earth. The act of mooring, of tying down, which expects dormancy, responsibility and commitment, strings us in for intimacy and the kind of perdurance of non-suicidal people. Our nerves fray; they reach for comfort, like small flowers which have absorbed lightning. Going through the temporal activity of leaving the world without debt (to our bodily functions or to related people), our souls’ (or what remains of their helpless self-preservation) are suckled on until they are deflated segments of oranges. Thus why, it is important for our narrator to keep apart her bodily desires for a death full of intention and for the dissociative nature of sexual distraction. ‘Sex distances me from death, though it doesn’t bring me closer to life … [it] keeps me present and safe in a space both uncertain and comforting.’ One can immerse oneself in pleasure and still yearn for the purposeful, permanent end to her life. 

‘All of a sudden life explodes violently in your head, magnifying its sense and absence in equal measure.’

PERMAFROST is a difficult book to read, yet it was so effortless for me to be swept into our narrator’s thoughts, frequently dissociated from the body, tangled into her rich, poetic narrative of insecurities. Frighteningly, fascinatingly, reading a queer suicidal character’s suicidal ideations, pain affirmations, and difficult and unwillingness to integrate into ‘normal’ life, secured me even more. In the way that the intrusive parts of myself were reflected in this surreal, queer permafrost. Sometimes, I don’t know whether the ‘our’ and ‘we’ in this review attempt to position everyone reading in these clunky, missized shoes, or whether the pronouns are an echo where our narrator starts and my body-mind continues. The intensity with which we want life and want to let go, ripples like a blue fire, eventually starting a melting. The uncertainty with which the book ends rings in my head, fading into a weird, watery white noise. 

‘A hard-rock lullaby grows inside me, cracking the permafrost.’

 for introducing this book as something along the lines of ‘a sapphic mix of Moshfegh and “Love in the Big City”’, because it immediately urged me to pick it up. Picking up these threads of care, complexity of cure, and the ways our body-minds are characterised as ‘unnatural/abnormal’ and ‘natural/normal’ — which is often the case for us who (are conditioned to) see our bodies as an accident in this world — I want to also really recommend Eli Clare’s formative work, starting with BRILLIANT IMPERFECTION and his chapter in an edited book, MATERIAL ECOCRITICISM, titled; “Meditations on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure”.

fairuza hanun

‘Like love, death catches the body. So let it be caught unawares.’

C/W in review: suicidal ideation | book: self harm, suicidal ideation, erotic scenes

It is fascinating that a reader could never learn a narrator’s name and yet feel they know them intimately through the intricate patchwork of their body and mind, as if they’d known them their entire life. This review digresses with the hopeful politics of collective care which many of my previous reviews have highlighted. Instead, it wants to touch on the non-sustainability, in the long term, of current forms of care, which yearns to carve a (privatised) industry out of it without cohesive structural support from the welfare state and from social constructs. Along its disassembled narrative, PERMAFROST broaches the process of how care can easily depreciate and (re)produce moral, mental and physical injuries and transgressions.

The vignettes which compose this deliciously slim volume feel like a concatenation of knick-knacks pierced haphazardly by the thread of the narrator’s self; a poetry of pieces recovered from a garbage can, assorted things floppily and crisply abandoned. Objects can once belong and work indivisibly to an entity, but often it is exhausting to live in relation to another, despite what others may say about symbiosis, care and all the sunny ideas filling doughy hope. Our narrator is convinced relations are a ‘first-rate solvent’, and that the other person’s need for relentless reassurance is a ‘colossal effort that leaves [her] dead tired.’ Homeless and flitting between jobs, she wouldn’t have stayed to ‘comfort’ her sister — or more specifically, tolerate her sister’s queerphobic insensitivities and tiptoe around her fragile ego — in a post-heartbreak garbage mess, if it weren’t for the few days of residence and rest in her sister’s guest room. Sexual pleasure is the reason she also stays (present) in a relationship with a luxurious, simple woman whose existence dehumanises her. As society waves your life as a trophy and yet simultaneously labels your sins, you have to live with precautions and cure-seeking aid, ‘grey and unassuming like female pigeons but aggressive like mothers.’

There comes a point when extraction of our selves from humans at the right time can be the kind of medication we need. The same way with how adulthood enables extrication from passively abusive parents (and yet, not completely; for you are bound forever by life and bloodlines). All this pessimism and reluctance towards ‘care’ is inextricable from the static, disappointingly predictable ways of being — the frustrating cycle of non-reciprocity, of finding our desires unmet and unsatisfied after having given so much of us (though I guess there’s an advantage to this predictability; a precaution against our anxiety). 

Crisscrossed with triggering images, lingering sensations, much of the story bears witness to our narrator’s obsession over the materiality of death and sex. Permafrost refers to the constant fumbling, grasping feeling which haunts our narrator: the crisp ice which floats between our feet and the thickness of waters below, suspending us, a sense of exhilarating untetheredness. We cannot decide whether the waters below is the sinking relief of death or the suffocating viscosity of life.

When the permafrost cracks at an instance of warmth — from the narrator’s flings for pleasure, or rare, steadying moments of care — it commands that we moor ourselves to the earth. The act of mooring, of tying down, which expects dormancy, responsibility and commitment, strings us in for intimacy and the kind of perdurance of non-suicidal people. Our nerves fray; they reach for comfort, like small flowers which have absorbed lightning. Going through the temporal activity of leaving the world without debt (to our bodily functions or to related people), our souls’ (or what remains of their helpless self-preservation) are suckled on until they are deflated segments of oranges. Thus why, it is important for our narrator to keep apart her bodily desires for a death full of intention and for the dissociative nature of sexual distraction. ‘Sex distances me from death, though it doesn’t bring me closer to life … [it] keeps me present and safe in a space both uncertain and comforting.’ One can immerse oneself in pleasure and still yearn for the purposeful, permanent end to her life. 

‘All of a sudden life explodes violently in your head, magnifying its sense and absence in equal measure.’

PERMAFROST is a difficult book to read, yet it was so effortless for me to be swept into our narrator’s thoughts, frequently dissociated from the body, tangled into her rich, poetic narrative of insecurities. Frighteningly, fascinatingly, reading a queer suicidal character’s suicidal ideations, pain affirmations, and difficult and unwillingness to integrate into ‘normal’ life, secured me even more. In the way that the intrusive parts of myself were reflected in this surreal, queer permafrost. Sometimes, I don’t know whether the ‘our’ and ‘we’ in this review attempt to position everyone reading in these clunky, missized shoes, or whether the pronouns are an echo where our narrator starts and my body-mind continues. The intensity with which we want life and want to let go, ripples like a blue fire, eventually starting a melting. The uncertainty with which the book ends rings in my head, fading into a weird, watery white noise. 

‘A hard-rock lullaby grows inside me, cracking the permafrost.’

I cannot thank you hard enough to @queerread for introducing this book as something along the lines of ‘a sapphic mix of Moshfegh and “Love in the Big City”’, because it immediately urged me to pick it up. Picking up these threads of care, complexity of cure, and the ways our body-minds are characterised as ‘unnatural/abnormal’ and ‘natural/normal’ — which is often the case for us who (are conditioned to) see our bodies as an accident in this world — I want to also really recommend Eli Clare’s formative work, starting with BRILLIANT IMPERFECTION and his chapter in an edited book, MATERIAL ECOCRITICISM, titled; “Meditations on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure”.

baelgia

Started out kinda slow, got real yummy in the middle, then ended... strangely. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the ending or looking for meaning where there isn't any to be found or missing the entire point. Still. 

Amazing novella otherwise. Loved the prose, style (loved the style), translation (enjoyed the translator's notes too! Kitchen curtains will stay with me for a while), and juicy inner monologuing.

Permafrost

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