Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. I pause – to gather my breath, and blinded eyes. But she doesn’t. With a singular aim that never misses the target, she shoots. She shoots maniac, she shoots incandescent. She shoots tender, she shoots ruthless. She shoots diabolic, she shoots sober. But Boulder doesn’t stop. That’s the one thing she doesn’t do – stop; throughout her journey in this rage of a book that sometimes surrenders to the untamed flame of desire and sometimes, rots under the dead embers of love.
Her hair looks like it’s about to self-immolate, a bundle of twigs that huddles together the second before the fire is lit. I wish she was always like this.
I haven’t met someone like Boulder in a long time – she embarks upon a sailing ship by the coast of Chile as its popular chef and disembarks from it for good to support her beloved in Iceland with the same conviction. Easy doesn’t come to her and she doesn’t seek it. What she seeks is clarity. Shifting love, moving wants, transforming bodies, expanding spaces, hazy priorities, changing behaviors – she drowns in them like an amateur swimmer every time, dreadfully stripped of off her experienced laps.
I’m a winter flower that bloomed by mistake and closes again.
Eva Baltasar writes with a crushing urgency that is impossible to shake off. Page after page, her words leapt like a possessed snake and dug its fangs in me with remarkable precision and consistency.
Desire cannot be killed, it can only be fermented and rocked to sleep.
Her depiction of love between Boulder and Samsa consumed me to the point of turning me a voyeur and just when I was settling into this new skin, she dropped me in a whirlpool of motherhood that besieges one and repels the other. This rabid dance of their relationship on the slider of time held me in such a circle of tense inebriation that my eyes failed to see through her legerdemain which was, after all, never her intent. In sensual, raw and metaphorically aching narrative spanning a decade, Eva brings to fore the inner schemas of desires that twist majestically to dissipate some telling truths. I still cannot fathom a book like this can breathe; perhaps, I am still held at neck by the silk and slither of the being she has conjured….
The power she exudes is subtle, almost tender, beautiful and supple yet resilient, like the silk of a spider’s web.
SEEMITA DAS 