Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

Spanish fiction

Original title – Mamut

Translator – Julia Sanches

Source – personal copy

I think this will be the big translated book of the summer. It’s no shock that her two other books in the loose trilogy have succeeded, with Boulder on the Booker longlist. Eva Baltasar started as a poet, and she won the Miquel de Palol prize when it came out. She then turned to novel writing with this trilogy of books about relationships and how motherhood or the wanting of children can affect a relationship; here we have another unnamed narrator, is it me or are these unnamed narrators a bit of a trope these days? For me it seems like every other book I  have read recently seems to have an unnamed narrator in it. I also saw this could be a companion book to Sara Mesa Un Amor as it has a similar starting point for the story of a young female heading into the hinterlands and a small village.

I have a used car. A rusty old Peugeot the size of an egg carton. I bought it from a stranger for two thousand euros because I wasn’t about to leave Barcelona with my belongings piled on a bicycle or take a train only to wind up stranded at a rural station in the back of beyond. The Peugeot is red, and while the doors may not close prop-erly, the paperwork is in order and it runs like a dream, which is all that really matters. I spend my first week at the inn driving from towns to villages and visiting real estate agencies. Most of the agencies are actually small accounting firms where farmers and cattle ranchers drop off their paperwork, although they tend to keep a list of cottages and farmhouses that are for sale or rent. The real estate market here is insane: the cost of renting a refurbished house is astronomical, and all I can afford are ruins, with the caveat of having to renovate the place myself

Her reasons for leaving  like many yoiung people the cost of housing

As I said, our narrator, a 24-year-old lesbian, has been wanting to have a baby and had slept with a number of men in the city to try and conceive a child. She has a daytime job as a researcher, interviewing a lot of old people in old people’s homes about their lives. But when this ends, and the job turns to Excel spreadsheets, she loses interest in the job, and thus, this helps her leave the job and set off in her small Pegeuot car to find. A rural idyll, she ends up in the mountains with a simple life and finds a job in a nearby village as a waitress. She also has an older man, a shepherd, who is her nearest neighbour. She also does battle with the stray cats is it me or are stray cats just a thing in certain parts of the world I remember a band otf stray cats when I was younger in an apartment in Portugal. Our narrator also decides to help the shepherd by becoming his cleaner. This is a lonely time, and these two unlikely lonely souls find themselves slowly drawn together. What will happen? Will she end up with a child?

The shepherd’s a good man. He must have noticed that times are tough because he asked if I could come by twice a week to clean his house, at my convenience. Naturally, I said yes. What I make waiting tables barely covers the rent.

He’s always home in the mornings, tending to his sheep.

Basically, moving shit from one place to another: sweeping out the pens, loading dung and soiled bedding into a wheel-barrow, and dumping it in the manure pile where it’s left to ferment in the sun. He makes a minimum of ten or twelve trips a day and the entire house reeks of shit. At first, it made my stomach turn, but a few days in I stopped noticing

The nearest neighbour is the shepherd

As I said, this had a similar start to Un Amor, a narrator leaving the city for the call of rural life. In this case, it is actually a totally alone place. This is a place with no real near neighbours. This is the wilderness and the closest person is the Shepherd to her, she heads to the village to work the cafe. The difference here is when they arrive, she starts to settle in, and in the relationship with the shepherd, we see one of those unlikely relationships build between the two. I loved the narrator as a voice, I was saying this book followed so well in Sanches translation. The mix of wilderness stray cats, the quirky shepherds, and being in the middle of nowhere all jump off the page. It is great to read this I haven;t read permanfrost and also see she has written a new novel this year. I think she may make the booker list again, but we will have to wait and see. It has a lot of modern issues, loneliness, wanting to escape the present you live in, WAnting a child as a lesbian, how to make this happen, and The rural dream. All of these are touched on in this book. Have you read any of this series of books by Eva Baltasar?

Winstons score ++A close to the best book I have read this year so far.