“Mammoth” (Mamut), by Eva Baltasar, translated from Catalan by Annie Bats, Verdier, 116 p., €19.50, digital €16.
With Mammoththe Spanish novelist and poet in Catalan Eva Baltasar closes her highly acclaimed trilogy on women breaking with conventional models. After Permafrost et Boulder (Verdier, 2020 and 2022), this last part features a young Barcelona woman equally in love with her freedom. The narrator, at 24, experiences sudden existential weariness. Her efforts to get pregnant, during a memorable “clandestine fertilization party” have failed. Her job as a university assistant loses its meaning when she realizes that her fellow sociologists are “technicians of emptiness”.
Having resigned, she took on odd jobs before setting sail. Goodbye to the vain hustle and bustle of the big city, its feeling of confinement, and head for the isolated regions of the province. In the mountains, alone in a decrepit house, far from any other dwelling, she will learn about a very rustic, not to say rudimentary, life, with the occasional help of a local shepherd.
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