"Permafrost" by Eva Baltasar

The first-person narrator is a suicidal lesbian from Barcelona. The first few chapters explore ways of ending herself: in chapter one she is in a high place, considering jumping, in chapter four she is next to a railway track. It feels a bit like jumping into freezing water. 

Except that in this water float not cubes of melting ice but jewels. The writer is a poet. She treats words like atoms of love that can be arranged and rearranged into molecules of magic. She crafts her sentences until they crystallise into the perfect observation, which not only paints what she's describing with unflinching accuracy and purity and clarity but also performs a forensic analysis which gets right to the heart of what it is and displays its simple truth. For which credit must also be given to the translator, Julia Sanches.

The plot? This is a bit too nouveau roman for a plot. It charts the narrator drifting through life, on a quest to find a reason to continue living, although the word 'quest' suggests a much more purposeful journey than this conceptual dérive. 

There are some moments of deep humour, such as when she castigates "unscrupulous people certified in first aid" who "foil death with cardiac massages and Heimlich manoeuvres. ... You can't even ram an olive pit down the wrong tube without them forcing you to spit it out, even if they break ribs or puncture lungs in the process. And there you are, covered in dry-martini puke, the olive pit hurled like a trophy at a corner of the room." (Ch 3)

The first few chapters (the ice plunge) are a difficult introduction but keep going: you'll get your breath back soon!

Described by Charlotte on goodreads as 'stream of pretentiousness'

Selected quotes:

• “I take a breath and make it mine as it courses through my animate airways.” (Ch 1)
• “‘When you grow up, you’ll understand,’ Mom never tired of saying. I must not have grown enough.” (Ch 2)
• “There's nothing more blinding than blood.” (Ch 6)
• “I harboured a deep insecurity that was fanned by my old-fashioned parents. ‘You can even draw a face out of a six and a four,’ Mom used to say, exercising the frank concern with which she kept my self-confidence in a near-vegetative state.” (Ch 7)
• “My life had been waylaid in a space that rippled with emptiness.” (Ch 7)
• “Doubt: the rift through which the world's heat slips in, a brazen violation of the permafrost.” (Ch 8)
• “Family, a first-rate solvent!” (Ch 10)
• “Some individuals can only grow as amputations.” (Ch 10)
• “In photos ... I always look like I've been superimposed. As if someone more childish yet far more powerful than any of us had a collection of paper-doll mes in various positions and decided to cut along my dotted outlines before pasting me into photos of other people who would later insist that they knew me.” (Ch 10)
• “I’d chosen Brussels because a city whose symbol is a little boy pissing was a city I knew I would like.” (Ch 12)
• “A considerate sister is like an information leaflet for contraceptives, with a list of contraindications and side effects as dangerous as a Gorgon.” (Ch 15)
• “Two or three customers shuffling around in their magnetic fields of loneliness.” (Ch 15)
• “Like coral snakes, not all marriages are poisonous - though it's best to keep your distance, just in case.” (Ch 16)
• “Modern psychobabble is like methadone for imbeciles!” (Ch 16)
• “As pure as a morning of blue skies.” (Ch 33)

October 2024; 122 pages

Eva Baltasar has also written Boulder. 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God