Permafrost by Eva Baltasar

​      The author of this book wrote ten poetry collections prior to veering into …well, whatever this is. For me, it read like a long form prose poetry narrative of a confessional nature. And no, I didn’t especially care for it.
       To be fair, I’m not a huge poetry fan, I’m trying to read some things here and there, but overall, it isn’t really me. Nor am I a fan of memoirs, fictionalized or not. Nor am I really a fan of experimental fiction. So, really, what on earth am I doing reading this book? Well, what can I say…I don’t know, it piqued my interest.
       It checked the international reading box, for sure, I’ve never read a Catalan author. This is a very European flavored book. And now and again, there were some interesting turns of phrase, some striking descriptions, etc. but overall, this wasn’t so much the case of being just too far out of my reading comfort zone, but a case of not offering enough to merit the venture.
       The protagonist is a woman so emotionally distant that her carapace explains the title. She compensates for it by having sex, copious amounts of lesbian sex with random women whom she doesn’t love, but really she just prefers her own company.  She occasionally relates to her much more conventional family. She observes life around her. That’s about it. Frankly, it’s too small of a book for the protagonist to do much, even if she did seem inclined to do so. This is more of a…scenes from a life in a style of a diary.
        It’s very vivid and very visceral and vascular in a way that’s meant to be revolutionary or mind-blowing, but mostly it just seems like oversharing of someone trying to be all those things. Look how daring and bold to write so frankly about sex…sort of thing. It might work for some, for me it was kind of off-putting, that makes me sound like a prude I’m not, it’s just a matter of personal preference. For me, sex ought to serve a story not be the story. Nihilistic overstylized by a hyperreal approach orgiastic adventures of an unlikable protagonist are not really it. This book is all too aware of its subversive preciousness.
       Then again, this book got a Critical Darling written all over its naked and glistening body, so I’m sure there’s an audience for this sort of thing. So, anyway, it was an experiment - they don’t all work. But at least, it had the decency to be brief about it. Pass.