Àlex Brendemühl recommends Eva Baltasar's "wild" writing.

BarcelonaÀlex Brendemühl, who a few weeks ago won the Cristal Globe for best performance at the Karlovy Vary Festival for the movie When a river becomes the seaPere Vilà Barceló is one of the most award-winning Catalan actors of his generation, with three Gaudí Awards, a Sant Jordi Award, and the Silver Bisnaga at the Málaga Film Festival. The novel he recommends is also one of the most award-winning in recent Catalan literature: Boulder, ofEva Baltasar, published in March 2020 and winner of the Òmnium Novel Prize and finalist for the Les Inrockuptibles Prize 2022 and of the Booker International 2023, considering it's the first work in Catalan to achieve this last milestone.

"I really like the way Baltasar writes, how he describes the protagonist's thoughts and feelings, and how he constructs his story, a struggle filled with rage and urgency of an unconventional woman, somewhat on the fringes of society," explains Brendemühl. Boulder It is the story of a woman who, after spending a few years working as a cook on a boat off the coast of Chile, settles with her partner in Iceland. "Through his interior monologue, Baltasar wildly describes his loneliness, a mentality that is in tune with the landscapes of the places where he lives," he points out. "He is a character who is in conflict with herself and with the world and who, in some way, is forced into a life of stability and the prospect of becoming a mother," he concludes. For the actor of Creature –for which he was nominated for the Goyas–, Boulder It is "a very powerful and surprising novel in the language it uses and very easy to read," and he recommends completing the reading with the other two novels by Baltasar with which it forms a trilogy: Permagel, published in 2018 and Mammoth, 2022.