Boulder and the Limits of Intensity
Spoilers: the ending of Boulder is discussed.
An evening on the sofa becomes a struggle over which part of the body will govern the others. In Eva Baltasar’s Boulder, a former ship’s cook has settled in Iceland with her lover Samsa, and their conversations about having a child increasingly take place sitting upright, away from the bed where their relationship once seemed sufficient to itself:
The sofa is a place for sitting and talking, a sensible piece of furniture designed to promote verticality and position the head as the sovereign supreme of all the subordinate organs, including the heart.
Eva Baltasar, Boulder, translated by Julia Sanches (And Other Stories, 2022).
Reason occupies the highest seat; everything that wants, aches or gives pleasure must accept its subordinate position. Even the cushions help Samsa govern, buttressing her until she can control the conversation. We feel Boulder’s resistance through the arrangement of her surroundings, as if domestic life had enlisted the furniture against her.
That ability to give ordinary circumstances an invasive physical presence supplies much of the novel’s power. Responsibility “sutures itself to the brain”: an obligation gains the means of fastening itself inside a person. The language also distributes blame. While Boulder feels acted upon by rooms, bodies and social arrangements, she has agreed to a life whose demands she resents. She admits concealing her reluctance to become a mother because she cannot bear to lose Samsa. The fury belongs to someone who has helped produce the situation she describes.
I found the writing powerful at times and the novel considerably less compelling than its sentences. Failed love, an affair and incompatible desires for family life receive a succession of charged images, whose coherence is easy to admire. Their development is less persuasive. Too often, a new circumstance gives the hostility another object without substantially changing its force or direction. The experience accumulates vehemence while leaving the relationship itself comparatively little room to surprise us.
The comparison with Bukowski reproduced by the publisher has an intelligible basis in drinking, clandestine sex and a familiar masculine pattern of escape; it also claims a stylistic affinity. My own attraction to Bukowski has much to do with the tenderness that can emerge from a sordid setting. Baltasar’s harshness frequently works upon the apparent consolations of ordinary life: a comfortable home, a desired pregnancy, women supporting one another. Such things grow repellent under Boulder’s attention. Her disgust has considerable imaginative range, although its preferred targets soon become familiar.
Care before motherhood
Maternal language already surrounds Boulder during the years she remembers as free. The merchant ship nurtures its crew in “amniotic fluid”; the people aboard become a family. Preparing empanadas, she imagines the dough as a covered body working while she sleeps, then as a nephew whose astonishing growth took place during her absence. Shelter, kinship and the production of life belong among her pleasures long before Samsa wants a child.
The pleasure depends partly on how little these forms of care ask her to surrender. A nephew grows out of sight; dough rises overnight and becomes food she knows how to make; the ship holds everyone together while allowing her to feel unaccountable.
Through these comparisons Baltasar creates a hospitable world whose intimacy seems compatible with leaving. In the life Samsa proposes, care will continue after Boulder tires of providing it, and the person who needs her will have claims beyond those she wants to honor.
Against that prospect, the pregnancy’s violent imagery becomes more intelligible, while its repeated expression grows less surprising. Samsa’s body becomes a reactor, a grenade, the host of a ravenous growth. Each comparison has local force; together they repeatedly convert her changing needs into threats against the person watching. The metaphors can name different kinds of danger faster than the relationship develops different kinds of difficulty. A quarrel about prenatal classes receives the force of poisoning; a demand for attention becomes biological invasion. Eventually the extremity itself begins to feel routine.
There are passages where the same imaginative materials become more responsive. Kneading dough much later, Boulder compares its rising to the effect of Samsa’s milk on Tinna. The connection crosses her earlier division between welcome nourishment and oppressive maternity.
Baltasar has kept bread in the novel long enough for this recognition to belong to Boulder’s own experience of feeding people: through the likeness, something she resents acquires a process she already loves.
Desire and the person it invents
In the description of Anna, a customer at Boulder’s food truck, a profession grows out of an appearance. Boulder takes “the look of a curator” far enough to search the city’s museums for her, learning only when they go out together that Anna works in a salon.
Embarrassment briefly relieves her of taking her own behavior seriously. Soon she is telling stories of the sea, watching Anna listen, then losing interest when the conversation turns toward Anna’s own travels. Her descriptions continue to make the woman desirable while her narration leaves that woman largely unheard.
The sexual language grows out of this imbalance. Anna’s beauty restores oceans, voyages and the appetite of Boulder’s former life; her body carries a promise of recovered freedom before Boulder has taken much interest in what she says. The desire can feel insincere, its extravagance more invested in the lover’s self-image than in an encounter. Baltasar makes the failure visible: Boulder eventually acknowledges leaving Anna without considering whether a real person might be inside the body. Such candor establishes distance from the narrator, although the explicit diagnosis also completes a pattern that the scenes have made readily legible. Boulder imagines, consumes and departs, and the language keeps replenishing the same fantasy of herself.
Her hostility toward mothers raises a related difficulty. In conversation with Ragnar, she admits that resentment chooses her words and that she speaks about women while excluding herself from their number. The old ship’s cook becomes an identity from which she can judge them at a distance. A sympathetic review grants this female voice a freedom to say things that might be unacceptable from a man. The possibility troubles me because a change in the speaker’s identity leaves the represented women just as diminished.
Literary freedom includes the freedom to create this gaze; its interest depends on how fully the novel lets us perceive what the gaze misses. Boulder’s admissions give us some of that distance. The plot’s treatment of her suspicions makes it harder to sustain.
The affair and the earlier image
The breastfeeding group concentrates her resentment into a single designation: “orgies.” Having briefly enjoyed Tinna’s company alone, Boulder must bring her downstairs, where Samsa and the other mothers have assembled.
Her pleasure with one particular child gives way to a description that masses women and babies together, then sexualizes their shared bodily ease. The change in language follows the loss of access: she has been asked to give up the intimacy she had just discovered. Her exaggeration seems revealingly jealous.
When Boulder later finds Samsa with another woman, the encounter recalls her earlier sexualization of maternal intimacy. A contrasting reading finds the ending inevitable, and the rejection of Boulder’s fantasy has considerable force. Samsa’s desire has continued beyond the life Boulder grants her in narration, and its discovery destroys a carefully prepared fantasy of reconciliation. On the way home, Boulder has enlarged their house in her imagination into a bright mansion, complete with gardens, music and a family rushing to welcome her. She expects flowers and a return to bed to make that imagined welcome possible. The closed bedroom door belongs to a household continuing without her.
The novel has been praised for making figurative language literal. Here, I felt the arrangement giving the hostile imagery too convenient an answer. Boulder’s word had collapsed maternal closeness into sexual excess; the later scene links breastfeeding with sexual pleasure. The resemblance gives her disgust a renewed imaginative force alongside the exposure of her self-deception. Samsa escapes Boulder’s account through an encounter that fits the imagery Boulder had used to diminish her.
Foreshadowing can make surprise feel necessary once it has happened. The repeated images prepare the resemblance more fully than the intervening relationship earns the event’s particular shape. I can admire the connection and still feel the author arranging life to secure it. The novel can begin to feel like a pamphlet when its arrangement gives a hostile position too much help, even though its narrator has openly discredited herself.
Returning to sea with Tinna ashore
Tinna gives the language a different kind of continuity. When Boulder watches her daughter sleeping, her attention follows the veins visible beneath new skin, the dampness of her neck, the small movements with which she asks for music. The child’s signals require interpretation, and Boulder occasionally admits that she may be guessing. Dancing together, they develop an intimacy whose movements the adult could neither have planned nor supplied alone. The maritime imagery persists, but being carried along now includes responding to someone.
By the closing chapter, the sea contains the costs of that response. Boulder washes dishes aboard a cruise ship that returns to Reykjavík on a fixed route; she pays child support and sees Tinna for four or five days each month. Her continuing attacks on Samsa’s motherhood sit beside an acknowledgment of how much Tinna loves the parent who is there every day. The division remains unequal, and Boulder still imagines taking work on other boats. She stays with the route that will bring her back to her daughter.
The return costs her a cook’s job and leaves her washing dishes on a repetitive route, with days set aside for someone she continues to need. Across much of Boulder, I felt the author reaching for force before the relationship had earned it. Remaining on this boat holds together, for now, a divided affection, a continuing wish to leave and the promise of another day with Tinna.
Sources and Further Reading
Eva Baltasar. Boulder. Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches. And Other Stories, 2022. Originally published by Club Editor, 2020. Publisher and edition details.
El Periódico. Comparison with Charles Bukowski, reproduced on the And Other Stories page for Boulder.
Ann Morgan. “Book of the month: Eva Baltasar.” A Year of Reading the World, April 28, 2023.
Jan Hicks. “Boulder.” What I Think About When I Think About Reading, August 20, 2024. A contrasting reading of the ending.
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