Eva Baltasar and the infection of love

The new novel byEva Baltasar (Barcelona, ​​1978), FishIt contains powerful ideas, conveyed through consistently sharp, often pithy phrases. And there's one fundamental one, so illustrative it illustrates perfectly: "It's as if Victoria, instead of loving me, had infected me. As if love were a transmission and not a creation." I think this is the crux of the matter. FishThe love between the two protagonists is experienced by one of them—the narrator—as a transmission—infectious, not beneficial. There is, therefore, no shared creation, but rather domination and submission. The lover, besides being an enigma, is excessive in every way. In fact, physically, he is already gigantic when compared to the other. Outside of his hands: curiously, his are smaller.

The plotline is simpler, more basic, than that of the four sheepThe author's previous works: a perverse love story. (I resist understanding it as a love story, plain and simple, as the book's back cover claims.) The narrator, like Eva Baltasar, is a successful writer. This time, we don't know her name either. One day, the writer arrives in a town to participate in a book club about one of her books and meets Victoria, who that very night will become her lover. This one does have a name (and it's not an innocuous one). They meet at a local market, where Victoria sells fish and wine from her own caravan.

The overwhelming irruption of desire (a desire that grows in the lover's absence) marks the first stages of the relationship. But the way they experience it distinguishes the two lovers: "My desire is a dismemberment. Hers is destitution and hedonism, and also a great weariness." The narrator drives to the northern town where her lover lives, a defiant act that almost jeopardizes her driving (it reminded me of a Brecht poem that argues a lover driving must pay close attention to the road because otherwise, a single raindrop could never kill them—and therefore, they shouldn't back down). This first stage of her love—like the resolution—is described in more detail than the stage that forms the crux of the affair. In the initial stage, the theory seems clear (because practice hasn't yet begun to erase it): "Love [...] is not just a feeling because it is made of will." But there are inhibited wills, as is the case with the narrator. In a later passage, the protagonist expresses herself thus, in relation to her own home: "I feel that I abandoned the house when I met Victoria and that the person who visited it wasn't me, it was someone else."

A risky style

Baltasar paints an oppressive picture, subtly and narratively effective, featuring a woman "who drowns her pain by inflicting pain" (and another who, for a time, becomes entangled in it). In discussing her previous novels, I've referred to the lyrical, as well as the symbolic, component of her prose. Now I will argue that it is a risky style, which the author develops with unwavering commitment. Consider these statements: "A beautiful and impertinent sky, dipping its fingers into the glasses and reddening the cava"; "I have a terrible stomach ache that rises to my throat and there becomes a hook. It's been stuck there for a long time; it's the hook where unspoken words bite." These are not the kinds of statements we usually find in a psychological novel with a realistic bent. This is Baltasar's genuine stylistic trademark.

When the unnamed protagonist has already begun her own personal detoxification process, she returns to the novel she was working on, but decides to start writing another. This second one is the one we will read. The cathartic cry at the end is uttered not in solitude, like Rodoro's Natalia, but before the other woman. Despite the addictive nature of the drama she is experiencing, she manages to break free from it. Victoria has gone so far as to denigrate him in the most intangible and precious thing he can offer: his literature. The unflappable lover, moreover, boasts that no one has ever abandoned her. The novel ends with the erasure of the lover's traces. Of his letters: she doesn't burn them—a sublime and literary way of making them disappear—but rather throws them in the trash. A response to so much violence suffered. Having done this, the story's ending can be written: "I disown this novel. I renounce the love you have read." An irrefutable, raw, and also very beautiful book.