Boulder by Eva Baltasar immediately draws you in with its dark and magnetic prose. The novel follows a woman nicknamed Boulder, a cook on a merchant ship who revels in solitude until her lover, Samsa, convinces her to settle down with her in Iceland. Cracks in their seemingly idyllic relationship appear early on, but they are thrust to the forefront when Samsa announces that she wants to get pregnant – a concept completely inimical to Boulder, who has little affinity for children.
“I’m not into kids. I find them annoying. They’re unpredictable variables that come crashing into my coastal shelf with the gale force of their natural madness. They’re craggy, out of control, scattered. They’re drawn to me the same way cats zero in on people who are allergic to them.”
A character-driven novel, the story follows the main character, Boulder, as her life is slowly changed by the arrival of a baby and the cracks in her relationship with Samsa deepen.
The writing of Baltasar reads like poetry, written in short bursts teeming with metaphors and similes in a stream-of-consciousness style that sucks the reader in. The narrator is brutal and honest about her desires (freedom, passion, sex) and lack thereof (motherhood, children, domesticity) and does not seem to care for social conventions – at least inwardly. On the outside, we see Boulder pushed into a life that she constantly states that she doesn’t want – accepting it all with a grimace and drunken nights at the local bar.
Motherhood is the central theme anchoring the internal and external conflict of the novel. While Samsa feels at home in the domestic life she has perfectly cultivated for herself, Boulder feels adrift and cast away. The distance between the two women grows until it reaches its zenith forcing Boulder to confront her desires and reclaim control of her life.
“I needed to face the emptiness, an emptiness I had dreamed of so often I’d turned it into a mast, a center of gravity to hold onto when life fell to pieces around me.”
Boulder is a brief novel, but its exploration of desire, freedom, and motherhood lingers long after the final page.
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