Title: Boulder

Author: Eva Baltasar Sardà

Genre: Fiction

Rating: 3.5/5

Eva Baltasar Sardà’s “Boulder” is a short novel about how the queer body becomes the vessel and prisoner of desire. Translated from Catalan, Julia Sanches’ English translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023.

The sea, the enormous mouth

The protagonist is lulled by the seas of Chile, working as a cook tucked in her galley. The destinations blur into waves—there is only the journey, the search for “true zero.” Sanches translates feelings through the shapes and textures of treacherous waters—a site where purpose becomes singular and emotion becomes the mindless crashing of waves and currents. But when ravenous feelings contort the narrator in the flood of desire she experiences upon meeting a woman, she is given a name—Boulder.

Boulder—a large fragment of rock often shaped by water erosion and weathering. Baltasar Sardà purposefully leaves the narrator with no other name but the one given to her by the seas. This is a glaring reflection on the unplaceable nature of navigating love in a queer body—it is transformative when it cannot be named and corrosive when it pursues normalcy. 

The wind, the hand that grabs at everything

Boulder meets Samsa in Reykjavík, Iceland. The seas of Chile and true zero become everything she has never wished for. A new shore, a new job, a new home, and a new life. 

“I feel the hardness of the rock in which desire has become lodged… Parts of my body have hardened to her shape.”

Baltasar Sardà writes a striking story not just on the voracity of love but its capacity to become the barrier between sacrifice and abandonment. To be frank, Samsa has traditional desires—to have a home, settle down, and bear a child. When Boulder realizes that this goal steers her ship in a direction that she cannot reconcile with her adriftness, she loses the listlessness of her galley life and quickly turns from a container of desire into its pawn. 

Love leaves residue

“Nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.”

Perhaps this is exactly what Boulder tries so hard to grit her teeth along—the determinism of a normal life and a normal family, being born with a sense of home inside you, an inner skill for conversing and laughing at the right moment that goes against the oceanic condition of her queerness, and the very condition that washed her up on Samsa’s shore. 

With its steady tone, the novel can be read in one sitting. It reads like an undercurrent, silent but formidable, full of connections being drawn between the body and nature around it. 

Boulder boldly discusses the power of an all-consuming love, how fast it can turn into puppetry and return to true zero. 

Boulder can be purchased online through Shopee.