women’s body and desire

A lesbian art graduate’s biographical, candid and darkly funny fiction tell us Eva Baltasar is a Catalan poet who lives a simple life with her wife and two daughters in a village near the mountains.

 Permaforst is about lives of three women  Boulder, about ship’s cook who has an IVF baby appeared in Catalan last year.

Set in Barcelona and Brussels the action is told by an unnamed lesbian art graduate  who recounts her job history, sex life and various health scares, both mental and physical. She quits work as an au pair in Scotland after only a week, and fall for her student while teaching Spanish in Belgium. Her self-sufficiency contrasts with the experience of her sister, who is pregnant with a second child.

The narrator’s observations are tender, caustic and strange. “the world is full of unscrupulous people certified in first aid and it is possible to rent corners for dying in peace, without interference or self-activated oxygen tanks dropping down on you at the very last moment” she complains.

Premafrost is captivating when it focuses on women’s bodies, desire and sex, the sensations and emotions of which the narrator documents with lucidity and dynamism.

One passage recalls her experience of viewing a pornographic video aged 11, with a group of classmates at another girl’s house after school, as she begins to fantasise nightly about her host.

She tells us about the “alien drool” in her underwear, or writes vividly of her periods,  with open minded scrutiny of experience.

The narrator is an un inhibited lover and a wickedly funny observer of modern life, desperate to get out of Barcelona, she goes to Brussels, because a city whose symbol is a little boy pissing was city I knew I would like, she develops a hatred of the colour green, Everywhere she goes she tries to break out of the roles set for her by family and society chasing escape wherever it can be found love affairs, travel, thoughts of suicide/

 It is a breathtakingly forthright call for women’s freedom to embrace both pleasure and solitude and speaks boldly of the body, of sex, and of the self

Permafrost by Eva Baltasar, Translated by Julia Sanches, And Other Stories £10, 128 pages.