International Booker always has several excellent books and Boulder by Eva Baltasar is one of those books. This small novel takes the familiar theme of loss of individuality in a relationship but the humorous and the lively prose are the true highlights of the novel.
For most of us, life has to take a particular narrative - a meet-cute, a happy relationship, some children and a happily banal after; let us just call it the idealised course of life. That is how it is with Samsa, the woman narrator fell in love with. What is it that people like about it? It is a conventional system that give meaning to everything in life:
‘her motherhood is just that, a tiered system of values that aspires to encompass and clarify everything,’
The protagonist of the story, on the other hand, is someone who wants to stay free.
‘I can give anything up because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.’
She had refused to be tied down by her jobs before she met Samsa. Even finding a lover was a way of satisfying her desire:
"I want to keep a lover there. I sit on deck, drink, smoke half a pack of cigarettes, and feel stupid. It’s been over a year since I held a woman in my arms. My body rails at me, it demands another body to touch and stimulate and use to satisfy its own monstrous hunger—until that person, her purity, her charms are used up and spat out. I’m dying to open and close a door, to pull another mouth to bed with my mouth, to parcel out desire."
However, once she has met Samsa (who was the one that gave her nickname 'Boulder') and fallen in love with her, she finds her life fixed to that idealised course of life. It starts with them moving into a place, which upsets her sense of freedom to no end.
‘The short term can tether you to the world of senses—the hazardous, inexact border that cuts through the forest…Its greatest virtue is that it keeps you on your toes. At the same time they removed me from my chosen life. Eight years with Samsa and every millimeter of land has been charted. All of it. How can existence exhaust itself? I contemplate disappearing.’
Then as the usual milestones of relationships go, Samsa wants a baby. The idea of a baby scares the narrator like it would anyone who loves their individuality (including yours truly). Perhaps it is because some of us are too full of life to give into that biological enslavement which imprisons parents to their children or perhaps we are afraid. At some point, the narrator calls it impotency. Either way, the fact remains she doesn't want a baby.
‘I don't tell her that what I want is to not be a mother.’
You can claim it is Samsa who lacks life or you can claim it is Boulder depending on how you define life. If you define it in its biological roots, then a willingness to have children seems a natural function of being full of life. And it is Boulder who lacks life as everything about babies scares her:
"It becomes clear to me how imperfect nature is. Imperfect and cruel, almost furious. It’s not wise and never has been. How many centuries have to pass before a woman can give birth without it looking like an experiment?"
‘Having a kid is an enormous undertaking. It kicks into gear right away, without any warning. It comes out of nowhere with such extraordinary force that it razes everything to the ground, like an earthquake…It seems unbelievable that a single decision, a fucking intangible thought, could so violently upset the flesh-and-bone scaffolding of daily life, the steady rhythm of the hours, the predictable, material color of the landscapes that give us nourishment and company…Its presence has dimension; it occupies the house with concrete tentacles, sinks into the skulls of the people who live there, and clings to the fine membrane that sheathes their gray matter. I can't get away, it follows me wherever I go like a sinner harassing another sinner, stoning him and hissing all of his fears into his ear.’
On the other hand, if you connect being alive to being free and being able to live for yourself, it is others around her who seem to lack life or maybe they just don't feel imprisoned by that idealised narrative in the same way.
‘Language is and always will be an occupied territory.’
And that is why it remains difficult to say something concrete about it. Maybe the narrator has enough of herself and doesn't need a baby to feel her life fulfilled or maybe she is a child too full of herself and it is Samsa who is mature enough to want to raise a child. All I can say is I relate more to the narrator.
Maybe, the title signifies the resistance the narrator shows against tides of time. Yet, narrator does change over time:
‘Holding Tinna like this makes me feel strange and new. It makes me think of all the words that have grown over me like hedges or weeds. Among them, one that's harder and older than any other in the world: mother.’
And of course, the best thing about this novel remains its sometimes sensual, sometimes comic and always erudite prose:
"Repetitive thoughts come out of nowhere like rough weather, gathering strength as they cross the ocean, and bursting into my head with such force I’m left feeling like they have it out for me, like they’ve been trying to track me down so they can whip me to pieces and make me theirs, dead or alive."
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