Reading guide: Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches

Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, who gives her the nickname ‘Boulder’. When the couple decide to move to Reykjavik together, Samsa announces that she wants to have a child. She is already 40 and can’t bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused but doesn’t know how to say no - and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien. With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom will trump her yearning for love.

Eva Baltasar demonstrates her pre-eminence as a chronicler of queer voices and characters navigating a hostile world in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga. 

Born in Barcelona, Eva Baltasar is a Catalan author and poet who has published ten volumes of poetry, to widespread acclaim.

Her debut novel, Permafrost, received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for France’s 2020 Prix Médicis for Best Foreign Book. It is the first novel in a triptych, which aims to explore the universes of three different women in the first person - Boulder is the second part. The author lives a simple life with their wife and two daughters in a village near the mountains.  

Julia Sanches has translated works from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan.

From Portuguese, she has translated Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques; from Catalan, Permafrost by Eva Baltasar; and from Spanish, Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, for which she won a PEN/Heim award. Sanches has also translated works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins, among others. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators’ collective. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she currently lives in Rhode Island, USA. 

When asked about the inspiration behind her novel, Eva Baltasar told The Booker Prizes website: ‘My protagonists are mirror images of myself, only more precise and always veiled. [… ] I was driven to write Boulder because I was fixated on the idea of getting to know a woman, through literature, who could embody a boulder; a woman like that isolated, solitary rock; a living metaphor at the mercy of the elements and weather, with cracks that allowed me to dig into her and uncover the secret hardness inside.’ Do you see these traits within her characterisation of the lead protagonist? What makes Boulder unique as a character? 

Baltasar’s novel is part of a triptych, with its predecessor Permafrost published in 2018. While there’s no explicit link between the novels, Baltasar noted within Permafront that ‘it is the first novel in a triptych that aims to explore the universes of three different women in the first person’. Why has the author taken the unusual step to write in this manner? Does it affect the experience of reading Boulder?

Baltasar is an acclaimed poet as well as an author and our judges described Boulder as ‘a poet’s book’. In an interview with The Booker Prizes website, the novel’s translator Julia Sanches said: ‘I translated this book slowly, though I can’t remember how long the entire process took. Only that I spent a long while weighing each sentence, re-writing it, reading it aloud, as if the whole thing were a collection of poetry. Which it is, in a way.’ To what extent did you feel that Baltasar’s prose and Sanches’s translation read like poetry? What did their use of language add to the reading experience? 

Boulder is also rich with metaphor and simile: ‘We all incubate here in the boat’s amniotic fluid; the boat loves and nurtures us, it invites us to take another look at ourselves.’ (page 12). Our judges said: ‘We were overwhelmed by certain metaphors, whose originality and sensuality swept us away.’ What did you feel the author’s use of metaphor brought to the story? Did it help you understand the protagonist’s worldview on a deeper level? 

Boulder begins with the unnamed narrator and protagonist living on her own on an island. She is searching for the ‘true zero’ of life (page 10). What does she mean by this? Does it or can it exist, for the protagonist or others? 

The novel is written entirely in the first person and is made up of short sections, yet also lengthy monologues. Did this point of view and style enhance your connection with or understanding of the protagonist?

Much of the novel is concerned with the relationship between Samsa and Boulder, and the changes that ensue when Samsa decides she would like a child. ‘She looks at me with those blue eyes that fade to gray in the warm apartment light, and I have the feeling she has everything, that she is one and whole, like a god. That, somehow, her desire for a child spoils her.’ With Boulder ambivalent towards children and parenting, Baltasar has written a subversion of motherhood – something we don’t often see depicted in literature or art. Does this feel like an accurate portrayal? If so, why do we not see more of this point of view? 

The protagonist feels at home in barren and stark locales, or adrift in the ocean. Discuss how landscape plays an important role in Boulder and how it speaks to the human drama that unfolds. 

Kirkus Reviews called Boulder ‘a modern love story – global, queer, existential in its moral hierarchies – but it is also a rumination on those two most ancient of words: lover and mother.’ Baltasar has been cited as ‘a chronicler of queer voices’. Did Boulder read as queer fiction to you, or is that label unhelpful or restrictive? Why do we not see more queer accounts of motherhood in culture?

Baltasar told Pink News that she owed a debt to writers and pioneers in the LGBTQ+ space that came before her, such as Virginia Woolf, whose book, Orlando, she received on her 12th birthday, ‘giving birth to a “long lasting love”’. Do you see any of Woolf’s influence on the author’s writing? 

Our judges said that Boulder is ‘a book about appetite – in the most common sense of the word, since the narrator is a passionate cook – but also about the appetite for another’s body, for life and for freedom. The passages where the narrator cooks on the boat while thinking about the woman she loves are madly sensual descriptions.’ Do you agree with the judges here?