Permafrost is the stunning narrative debut of Eva Baltasar, a brief and intense novel that harshly explores the body, desire, and loneliness through a narrative voice as sharp as it is lucid.
Written in the first person, the story takes us inside the mind of a woman who lives protected behind an emotional shield, a kind of inner permafrost. Like the layer of permanently frozen ground that gives the book its title, this frozen membrane separates her from the outside world. From there, she observes everything around her with irony and distance: an obsessive and controlling mother, a sister settled into medicated normality, and an environment that feels deeply alien to her.
The protagonist lives with suicidal impulses and an unrelenting view of life, but at the same time she passionately embraces what keeps her alive: sex with other women, literature, and art. Between the most carnal hedonism and a constant attraction to death, the story unfolds as an electric monologue full of dark humor, intelligence, and radical frankness.
Baltasar’s writing, shaped by her background as a poet, is filled with vivid and powerful physical imagery that makes the body the true territory of the novel. Permafrost is thus a direct, sharp, and deeply personal work that reflects on female freedom, desire, chosen solitude, and the difficulty of inhabiting the world.
With this novel, Eva Baltasar begins the narrative triptych that will continue with Boulder and Mamut, three connected books that explore different stages and ways of living female identity and experience.
