Mammoth

‘The title of the novel is a metaphor for the protagonist, who sees herself as a strong, powerful animal, capable of handling anything, although the author reminds us that mammoths were under threat from being hunted by the humans of the time.’ Europapress ‘Eva Baltasar’s scintillating novel Mammoth, in which a woman rejects society for simple life and sensual joy, has intelligence and force.’ Luke Kennard, Daily Telegraph five-star review ‘The Catalan author’s intense prose seizes you from the first page of this short explosive novel.’ The Bookseller ‘In the pulsing latest from Baltasar (Boulder), a Barcelona lesbian attempts to forge a new life in the Catalan countryside. The unnamed narrator, 24, is disillusioned by her sociology research job at a university (“Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime”), and hopes to sate her feeling of emptiness by getting pregnant (“It wasn’t the desire to have a baby that took me hostage so much as the desire to gestate, to have life course through my body”). Baltasar’s unsettling and poignant descriptions offer a slim yet profound meditation on finding what it takes for one to feel alive. This is striking.’ Publishers Weekly ‘One of the preeminent chroniclers of queer life working today is Eva Baltasar, whose triptych of novels explores the lives of three different women who, translator Julia Sanches says, “are in the midst of trying to find their place in a world that suits them as much as a pair of too-small shoes.”’ Publishers Weekly ‘In “a rusty old Peugeot the size of an egg carton,” the narrator sets off on a journey that takes her ever farther from the epicentres of human society until she ends up at Cal Llanut, an isolated farmhouse high in the mountains where she feels she will finally find the solitude she needs to live “cleaved to the rock like a root, sucking up nutrients until every finger, every tooth, every last one of her thoughts is worn through.” Ardent and intimate, a novel of physical and psychological vistas.’ Kirkus Reviews ‘The third book in Eva Baltasar’s loose triptych of modern womanhood (the second part, Boulder, was shortlisted for last year’s International Booker prize) is the best yet.’ John Self, The Guardian ‘A surprising slim novel that trembles with the force of an approaching stampede. . . Baltasar’s sharp and forthright prose (adeptly translated by Julia Sanches) demonstrates how much can lie within one person, through the boiling, enraged voice of the narrator. . . Baltasar’s novel howls to ask: What is a life made according to one’s own rules? A quiet but hard-staring fighter of a book, Mammoth is, in a world doomed to end, one woman’s strange and powerful cry against her own extinction.’ Mary Marge Locker, New York Times