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Tríptic #3
Mamut
Eva Baltasar cierra el tríptico sobre la vida y los deseos de tres mujeres con una novela animal sobre una joven que abandona la ciudad para instalarse en una casa aislada.
La protagonista de Mamut es una chica arcaica atrapada en la vida moderna. Su hábitat es la ciudad, donde trabaja para vivir. Quiere ser madre, y esto la obliga a acercarse a los hombres ¿Cómo resistir el hormiguero humano si tienes instinto de cazador solitario?
Un día abandona la ciudad, cambia de entorno y se convierte en la dueña de una casa completamente aislada. Allí solo están el pastor, la soledad y bestias que te alimentan o te amenazan. El instinto trabaja, la conciencia se altera y se gesta una transformación.
Esta no es una novela más sobre la huida al campo, esto es una bomba de relojería sobre las llagas de la sociedad contemporánea, una narración in crescendo que aúlla a merced de esta novelista salvaje que es Eva Baltasar.
La protagonista de Mamut es una chica arcaica atrapada en la vida moderna. Su hábitat es la ciudad, donde trabaja para vivir. Quiere ser madre, y esto la obliga a acercarse a los hombres ¿Cómo resistir el hormiguero humano si tienes instinto de cazador solitario?
Un día abandona la ciudad, cambia de entorno y se convierte en la dueña de una casa completamente aislada. Allí solo están el pastor, la soledad y bestias que te alimentan o te amenazan. El instinto trabaja, la conciencia se altera y se gesta una transformación.
Esta no es una novela más sobre la huida al campo, esto es una bomba de relojería sobre las llagas de la sociedad contemporánea, una narración in crescendo que aúlla a merced de esta novelista salvaje que es Eva Baltasar.
112 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2022
120 people are currently reading
8542 people want to read
About the author
Eva Baltasar
20 books905 followersEva Baltasar is a Catalan poet and writer. She has a bachelor's degree in Pedagogy from the University of Barcelona. She has published ten books of poetry, which have earned numerous awards including the 2008 Miquel de Palol, the 2010 Benet Ribas, and the 2015 Gabriel Ferrater. Permafrost was her first novel.
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June 12, 2025
The quest for the idealized life has long tempted and eluded the human mind and while Eva Baltasar’s Mammoth offers a scorching criticism of such an endeavor destined to end in disillusion, her work is illuminated in what could certainly be an ideal prose. The third in her triptych of novellas, following the equally unhinged, emotional tempests found in Permafrost and Boulder yet still fully accessible as a stand-alone read, Mammoth once again places us in the mind of an nameless, queer woman narrator as she grapples with the volatility of finding her place in the world. Desiring a child and fed up with life in the ‘ripened, self-corrupted’ city, she flees to a remote village in the Catalonian countryside believing ‘the phrase to do without may be the thing that frees me.’ Though the utopian image of rustic living and returning to the basics might crack in the cold reality of living as the narrator finds a wildness within herself full of violence. As with each of the triptych, Julia Sanches delivers an excellent translation into English and each page crackles with purpose. A brutal confrontation of the fetishization of rural life by city dwellers, the crushing weight of expectations on women, and the harsh realities of survival pull the reader through Mammoth as Baltasar yet again flays the reader with a pristine prose, sharpened and deadly succinct in its critical aim.
‘I go through hell and find it thrilling. I can’t get enough of this feeling—of my heart pulling the trigger and shooting.’
Beginning with the epigraph ‘an idea hungers for your body,’ by poet Les Murray, Baltasar—an accomplished poet in her own right—brings us into the headspace of a woman who finds her body to be commodified by the society around her. It is a common thread in the triptych, each featuring a different narrator yet the nameless aspect (unless otherwise nicknamed for a defining feature that affixes them in the minds of those around them such as the titular Boulder or, here, being referred to by her rural cottage name Llanut) grants a universality to each of these queer women and their difficulty maneuvering in a patriarchal society. Their relation to sexuality and, ultimately, motherhood is also a uniting theme, like a gravitational center pull each into orbit from the nannying positions in Permafrost that end abruptly in a new responsibility thrust upon her or the resistance to her partner’s journey to motherhood in Boulder. Mammoth, however, launches us directly into the narrator’s desire to have a child—though this is more honestly simply a ‘desire to gestate’—and a planned fertility party under the guise of her 24th birthday celebration. It is an urge like leaping into oblivion without any wish for a partner where ‘’any one of them would do’—a phrase I attack myself with and have to endure,’ and the brash nature of this headlong venture marks her general engagement with the world.
‘I’d been living in a drowning city, and I need this—the restorative silence of a decompression chamber.’
In the city she finds ‘a sterile, impenetrable life locked in ice,’ her body commoditized by for-profit labor she finds dehumanizing on all fronts. She frequently quits jobs and stresses over the ways the labor force uplifts the rich at her expense.
Working for the university interviewing elderly patients in senior-care she also finds her dehumanizing labor to become an act that dehumanizes those around her, something that is later paralleled where the violence of humans and animals in rural living begins to spread into violent actions from her.
In interview for Granta with Irene Solà, Baltasar, who herself lives in a rural Catalonian village near the mountains like the narrator moves to here, admitted ‘I’ve never been able to love a city,’ and this anxiety pours out of our narrator. Her Barcelona apartment has proximity to the zoo that allows her to hear the lion’s ‘ancient, roaring sorrows,’ something that she feels growling within her trapped in the city and identifying with ‘the singing of caged birds.’ Feeling city living has driven her into anhedonic despair, she sets out seek an idealized life in a small rural community.
‘Feeling alive means shouldering the burden’
Baltasar takes aim at rural tourism and the fetishization of ‘simple living,’ demonstrating the reality of hardship in such communities and the annoyance of those who merely visit as some self-serving “quest” but do not truly value such a life. The sort of city folks with J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘not all those who wander are lost’ quote on stickers attached to cars or water bottles who come to see the sights or, worse, abandon old cats that the narrator then has to deal with in increasingly unhinged and disturbing ways (trigger warning for those where feline violence is a dealbreaker). The narrator is not unlike them at first though, thinking the rural silence will give her the ability to live ‘cleaved to the rock like a root, sucking up nutrients until every finger, every tooth, every last one of my thoughts is worn through,’ and idealizes an ascetic lifestyle. ‘I like the thought of a house without a real bathroom,’ she tells herself, ‘the pigsty-messiness of it. I like that I have to focus on the essentials. How the need for a bathtub drives away all my more trivial thoughts.’ She makes bread feeling like she has tapped into her roots and ancestral heritage of breadmaking. It comes out poorly but she eats it anyways.
Had this novel been written in the US one might find it to be a criticism of the trad-wife culture and traditional living social media influencers. Baltasar has different aims, not only critiquing the city folks (or ‘big pond’ people as the shepherd, the closest thing to a friend she has there, calls them) idealizing the rural landscape, treating it as their entertainment, leaving their trash behind—‘I’m starting to understand the hostility towards big pond folk’—but also disillusioning such an image of rural life. . It is a brutal book and will make one consider that ‘There is no desirable life.’
‘The land belonds to life and life is the animals.The only purpose of humans is to steer and exploit them just enough to eke out a living.’
A rural citizen herself, Baltasar shows the harshness, the violence towards animals hidden from city folk who merely eat the food without seeing how it comes to be on their store shelves, and also the patriarchal structures and misogyny that aren’t just confided to the city. Just like the city, labor in the rural communities feeds the strong at the expense of others. In this case animals like the shepherd's lambs. We also see the narrator objectified, asked to engage in sex work for the shepherd (which she accepts in her pursuit of a child), and their disagreements often turn violent. We see the violence and cold of the land seeping into her,
The use of language is incredible too. In the early stages of the book living in the city she assesses herself through animal metaphors but later, in the rural life, through metaphors of weapons or objects with connotative violence such as feeling like a ‘rusty fish hook.’ People tend to be often compared to animals as well, from the senior-living community seeming ‘ferret-like’ and when sexually entangled with the shepherd she notes ‘his semen had the same manure-like aftertaste as the lamb.’ Baltasar’s prose is exquisite at every turn, moving through intense introspection to searing indictments of society with deft, devastating linguistic power. Julia Sanches does an excellent translation here, as she has with all Baltasar’s novels and her work on Boulder found it shortlisted for the Booker International. While being interviewed for the prize, Baltasar shared her joy at working with Sanches:
I cannot overstate how incredible her writing is. Even the title is well done, and though the titular beast does not make an appearance we are reminded of it (or more so its absence) in lines like ‘I don’t care whether I live or go extinct,’ or just simply the mammoth amount of expectations placed on women in society. Though my favorite is the idea of a mammoth living in caves and how our narrator thinks about the ways modern living responds to the exhaustion of work and society through our own modern idea of caves:
While this novellas are short and most one-sitting reads, they completely overpower you with prose and leave the reader breathless, bruised, and eager for more.
‘Nothing is mine, except me.’
A bleak and brutal yet rather beautiful novella, Eva Baltasar dazzles with the sharp critiques and unhinged survival mechanisms in Mammoth. While perhaps Boulder remains my favorite, this was still a wild ride of poetic delight and scathing wit. Like the warning of assuming the grass is always greener on the other side, Mammoth lampoons the belief in an idealized living, critiques both rural and city life, and presents a quest for motherhood in harsh tones that are destined to sink right into the reader’s heart. A fantastic little book from a fantastic writer.
4/5
‘I call for everything that was once mine to be turned over to life, for it to find a path of its own in this bitter, inhuman life, because it isn’t mine anymore.’
‘I go through hell and find it thrilling. I can’t get enough of this feeling—of my heart pulling the trigger and shooting.’
Beginning with the epigraph ‘an idea hungers for your body,’ by poet Les Murray, Baltasar—an accomplished poet in her own right—brings us into the headspace of a woman who finds her body to be commodified by the society around her. It is a common thread in the triptych, each featuring a different narrator yet the nameless aspect (unless otherwise nicknamed for a defining feature that affixes them in the minds of those around them such as the titular Boulder or, here, being referred to by her rural cottage name Llanut) grants a universality to each of these queer women and their difficulty maneuvering in a patriarchal society. Their relation to sexuality and, ultimately, motherhood is also a uniting theme, like a gravitational center pull each into orbit from the nannying positions in Permafrost that end abruptly in a new responsibility thrust upon her or the resistance to her partner’s journey to motherhood in Boulder. Mammoth, however, launches us directly into the narrator’s desire to have a child—though this is more honestly simply a ‘desire to gestate’—and a planned fertility party under the guise of her 24th birthday celebration. It is an urge like leaping into oblivion without any wish for a partner where ‘’any one of them would do’—a phrase I attack myself with and have to endure,’ and the brash nature of this headlong venture marks her general engagement with the world.
‘I’d been living in a drowning city, and I need this—the restorative silence of a decompression chamber.’
In the city she finds ‘a sterile, impenetrable life locked in ice,’ her body commoditized by for-profit labor she finds dehumanizing on all fronts. She frequently quits jobs and stresses over the ways the labor force uplifts the rich at her expense.
‘I lasted a few days at each job and left just as I was starting to get the hang of it, terrified I would become used to the exploitation…when I worked to someone else, I gave them the most precious thing I had, more precious that my time or body, more precious even than the meaning of the word itself: my dignity.’
Working for the university interviewing elderly patients in senior-care she also finds her dehumanizing labor to become an act that dehumanizes those around her, something that is later paralleled where the violence of humans and animals in rural living begins to spread into violent actions from her.
‘Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime. I hate my tool, the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people who, at the end of the day, had somehow persuaded life to put up with them all those years.’
In interview for Granta with Irene Solà, Baltasar, who herself lives in a rural Catalonian village near the mountains like the narrator moves to here, admitted ‘I’ve never been able to love a city,’ and this anxiety pours out of our narrator. Her Barcelona apartment has proximity to the zoo that allows her to hear the lion’s ‘ancient, roaring sorrows,’ something that she feels growling within her trapped in the city and identifying with ‘the singing of caged birds.’ Feeling city living has driven her into anhedonic despair, she sets out seek an idealized life in a small rural community.
‘Feeling alive means shouldering the burden’
Baltasar takes aim at rural tourism and the fetishization of ‘simple living,’ demonstrating the reality of hardship in such communities and the annoyance of those who merely visit as some self-serving “quest” but do not truly value such a life. The sort of city folks with J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘not all those who wander are lost’ quote on stickers attached to cars or water bottles who come to see the sights or, worse, abandon old cats that the narrator then has to deal with in increasingly unhinged and disturbing ways (trigger warning for those where feline violence is a dealbreaker). The narrator is not unlike them at first though, thinking the rural silence will give her the ability to live ‘cleaved to the rock like a root, sucking up nutrients until every finger, every tooth, every last one of my thoughts is worn through,’ and idealizes an ascetic lifestyle. ‘I like the thought of a house without a real bathroom,’ she tells herself, ‘the pigsty-messiness of it. I like that I have to focus on the essentials. How the need for a bathtub drives away all my more trivial thoughts.’ She makes bread feeling like she has tapped into her roots and ancestral heritage of breadmaking. It comes out poorly but she eats it anyways.
Had this novel been written in the US one might find it to be a criticism of the trad-wife culture and traditional living social media influencers. Baltasar has different aims, not only critiquing the city folks (or ‘big pond’ people as the shepherd, the closest thing to a friend she has there, calls them) idealizing the rural landscape, treating it as their entertainment, leaving their trash behind—‘I’m starting to understand the hostility towards big pond folk’—but also disillusioning such an image of rural life. . It is a brutal book and will make one consider that ‘There is no desirable life.’
‘The land belonds to life and life is the animals.The only purpose of humans is to steer and exploit them just enough to eke out a living.’
A rural citizen herself, Baltasar shows the harshness, the violence towards animals hidden from city folk who merely eat the food without seeing how it comes to be on their store shelves, and also the patriarchal structures and misogyny that aren’t just confided to the city. Just like the city, labor in the rural communities feeds the strong at the expense of others. In this case animals like the shepherd's lambs. We also see the narrator objectified, asked to engage in sex work for the shepherd (which she accepts in her pursuit of a child), and their disagreements often turn violent. We see the violence and cold of the land seeping into her,
The use of language is incredible too. In the early stages of the book living in the city she assesses herself through animal metaphors but later, in the rural life, through metaphors of weapons or objects with connotative violence such as feeling like a ‘rusty fish hook.’ People tend to be often compared to animals as well, from the senior-living community seeming ‘ferret-like’ and when sexually entangled with the shepherd she notes ‘his semen had the same manure-like aftertaste as the lamb.’ Baltasar’s prose is exquisite at every turn, moving through intense introspection to searing indictments of society with deft, devastating linguistic power. Julia Sanches does an excellent translation here, as she has with all Baltasar’s novels and her work on Boulder found it shortlisted for the Booker International. While being interviewed for the prize, Baltasar shared her joy at working with Sanches:
‘She knows me, my writing, and my terrain; she knows when the path is flat and when the dunes are variable, and she knows how to take up and translate the landscape of my writing, which in her hands becomes a shared space where the two of us meet. A translated novel is always a co-authorship, and I am lucky to share this with Julia Sanches.’
I cannot overstate how incredible her writing is. Even the title is well done, and though the titular beast does not make an appearance we are reminded of it (or more so its absence) in lines like ‘I don’t care whether I live or go extinct,’ or just simply the mammoth amount of expectations placed on women in society. Though my favorite is the idea of a mammoth living in caves and how our narrator thinks about the ways modern living responds to the exhaustion of work and society through our own modern idea of caves:
‘You lose the ability to think of anything but the basics: hunkering down in one place for as long as it takes to eat and then, when the day is done, sheltering in some hole from the dark and the inclement weather. Thousands of years ago, we referred to these holes as caves. Now we call them leisure, exercise, social media. We retreat to our depressing cells and feel smug, convinced we are the lucky ones.’
While this novellas are short and most one-sitting reads, they completely overpower you with prose and leave the reader breathless, bruised, and eager for more.
‘Nothing is mine, except me.’
A bleak and brutal yet rather beautiful novella, Eva Baltasar dazzles with the sharp critiques and unhinged survival mechanisms in Mammoth. While perhaps Boulder remains my favorite, this was still a wild ride of poetic delight and scathing wit. Like the warning of assuming the grass is always greener on the other side, Mammoth lampoons the belief in an idealized living, critiques both rural and city life, and presents a quest for motherhood in harsh tones that are destined to sink right into the reader’s heart. A fantastic little book from a fantastic writer.
4/5
‘I call for everything that was once mine to be turned over to life, for it to find a path of its own in this bitter, inhuman life, because it isn’t mine anymore.’
Read
November 18, 2025The phrase, 'pregnant with meaning', occurs to me when thinking about this book. Every line is laden not only with meaning but also with feeling, car-boot loads of feeling and meaning—and all that in a slim little book you could fit in the back pocket of your jeans.
I had ordered it after reading the author's Permafrost and Boulder earlier this year but 'Mammoth', the third in a loosely connected triptych, wasn't available until now as it hadn't yet been translated from Catalan into English.
When I finally received it, I read it in two days—and right after finishing Marvel Moreno's very long December Breeze which took me nearly two months (admittedly busy months when the only reading time was a few pages before sleep).
I mention Moreno's book because both hers and Balthazar's resemble each other in that they are about strong and vulnerable women. In Moreno's novel, women are either strong or vulnerable, but in Balthazar's novel—in her three novels—women are both strong and vulnerable at the same time.
And while Moreno's book is also loaded with meaning, Balthazar's has the edge when it comes to feeling. Those car-boot loads I mentioned earlier.
I know a 'car-boot load' is an odd way of describing an amount, but it suits the oddities of the main character in this book. She abandons her urban life, where she has become overly aware of the residents of a senior facility as well as of the animals in the nearby zoo, loads all her possessions into the boot of her rickety car, and heads off to a tumbledown house high up in the mountains. That same car-boot also represents the amount of food she can transport to see her through the winter months once the roads to her mountain retreat become impassible.
But then her life takes a loaded turn and she leaves the mountain.
When her little rickety car returns to the mountain, it no longer transports anything concrete at all—but it has a car-boot load of intense feeling onboard.
I loved this book.
I had ordered it after reading the author's Permafrost and Boulder earlier this year but 'Mammoth', the third in a loosely connected triptych, wasn't available until now as it hadn't yet been translated from Catalan into English.
When I finally received it, I read it in two days—and right after finishing Marvel Moreno's very long December Breeze which took me nearly two months (admittedly busy months when the only reading time was a few pages before sleep).
I mention Moreno's book because both hers and Balthazar's resemble each other in that they are about strong and vulnerable women. In Moreno's novel, women are either strong or vulnerable, but in Balthazar's novel—in her three novels—women are both strong and vulnerable at the same time.
And while Moreno's book is also loaded with meaning, Balthazar's has the edge when it comes to feeling. Those car-boot loads I mentioned earlier.
I know a 'car-boot load' is an odd way of describing an amount, but it suits the oddities of the main character in this book. She abandons her urban life, where she has become overly aware of the residents of a senior facility as well as of the animals in the nearby zoo, loads all her possessions into the boot of her rickety car, and heads off to a tumbledown house high up in the mountains. That same car-boot also represents the amount of food she can transport to see her through the winter months once the roads to her mountain retreat become impassible.
But then her life takes a loaded turn and she leaves the mountain.
When her little rickety car returns to the mountain, it no longer transports anything concrete at all—but it has a car-boot load of intense feeling onboard.
I loved this book.
August 21, 2024
It struck me that the history of humankind was one of heat, of the struggle for heat. Of defying the elements. Battling the cold. And that cold didn't only come from outside - it was human as well.
This quotation feels like it's looking back at Baltasar's triptych of loosely connected novels: Permafrost, Boulder and now this. They're nothing like a conventional trilogy: each is narrated by a different woman and the linkages are thematic and tonal rather than sequential in terms of narrative.
What they seem to have in common is an absolutely contemporary conception of what it means to live as a woman or in a female body today. In lots of ways Baltasar's women are troubled, but there's also a dark humour threading through the writing which keeps the pace energetic.
If motherhood was central to Boulder, here our narrator wants the experience of creating life, of giving birth without actually wanting to have a baby - and the ways in which she tries to bring this about involve instances of what are very close to non-consent, though here it's the female who is the instigator. She also abandons all the trappings of a modern, urban, capitalist, commercialised life-style taking herself off to a dilapidated dwelling in a rural village.
What ensues it something that is strange, violent, almost satirical in places - but always compelling. I'm a bit at a loss in understanding how Baltasar reels me in so completely and yet it's hard to pin down what this text is saying and doing with any exactitude.
May 16, 2022
La narradora de Baltasar tiene algo que me resulta magnético en su lectura, quizás sea su frialdad, el que no parece importarle nada, pero que para describir lo que ve, usa un lenguaje exacto y poético. Como si fuese un animalillo con palabras exactas para contar sus cosas. Hay momentos un poco desagradables e incómodos en esta historia, pero no deja de gustarme y de ser una narradora a la cual le creo lo que quiera contar. No sabía que esto era parte de una trilogía así que me tendré que leer el segundo. Hay algo en la vida del campo que describe que me recuerda a Los Asquerosos de Santiago Lorenzo, otro libro que me gusta mucho y que lo pondré cerca de este.
November 1, 2025
Eva Baltasar's triptych about three lesbian women and motherhood has a captivating relentlessness, a disturbing brutality in its outlook on life. In this last part, our narrator is a woman who, after graduating university in Barcelona, cannot find a place in life: She quits academia, then takes on and quits several other jobs, but cannot cope with the indignity of selling her time and skills to the ever-churning machine of dependent work under capitalism in order to survive. She decides to opt out, moves to a remote mountain settlement and earns money cleaning and bartending. As she enters a complex relationship with the local shepherd, she connects to her instincts and physicality in new ways - and this has consequences for her quest to get pregnant. Right from the start, she yearns not to become a mother, but to gestate, to create life...
So yes, the main topic here is how to be able to feel alive, to be present in the world while death is approaching, which it does from the second we are born. One of the most depressing jobs the narrator holds while she still lives in Barcelona is doing standardized research interviews in retirement homes, trying to quantify the lives of the elderly. But make no mistake, the life in the countryside isn't the cliched image of harmony either: Nature is brutal, and people are brutal - the shepherd mainly survives by eating lamb, although he already suffers from gout due to all the meat. In "Mammoth", life is fucking depressing, and the choice is only which kind of depression one prefers.
And no, there are no actual mammoths in the text. In scientific circles, there's apparently a debate why they've died out, mainly whether people have hunted them too much, whether their fertility declined, or whether climate change was a factor. In the novel, the animalistic drive to reproduce plays a central role, but the circle of life turns out to be a rather fragile concept, both for humans and animals.
Baltasar packs a lot in her short novels, and they are well-worth contemplating and discussing.
So yes, the main topic here is how to be able to feel alive, to be present in the world while death is approaching, which it does from the second we are born. One of the most depressing jobs the narrator holds while she still lives in Barcelona is doing standardized research interviews in retirement homes, trying to quantify the lives of the elderly. But make no mistake, the life in the countryside isn't the cliched image of harmony either: Nature is brutal, and people are brutal - the shepherd mainly survives by eating lamb, although he already suffers from gout due to all the meat. In "Mammoth", life is fucking depressing, and the choice is only which kind of depression one prefers.
And no, there are no actual mammoths in the text. In scientific circles, there's apparently a debate why they've died out, mainly whether people have hunted them too much, whether their fertility declined, or whether climate change was a factor. In the novel, the animalistic drive to reproduce plays a central role, but the circle of life turns out to be a rather fragile concept, both for humans and animals.
Baltasar packs a lot in her short novels, and they are well-worth contemplating and discussing.
February 23, 2022
Doncs ho sento, però no em sumo a les lloances. Que Eva Baltasar escriu molt bé és absolutament indubtable, com també ho és que aquesta història és molt fluixa. Perquè una novel·la sigui bona no val només amb saber escriure, i en aquest cas ens trobem amb un text que no va enlloc. També he de dir que quan la vaig entomar desitjava que m'agradés.
La realitat és que em vaig avorrir des de l'inici, tot i que vaig ser pacient esperant que la història millorés. Però res de res, ben al contrari, a mesura que avança t'adones que ni tan sols el fil conductor de tot —el desig d'un embaràs— es tanca adequadament, ho fa de forma precipitada i poc o gens creïble. És la típica —i repetida fins a no poder més— història de: dona angoixada i cansada del ritme de vida actual a la gran ciutat acaba fugint a un entorn rural per retrobar-se. Res de nou, i tampoc busquis originalitat en la manera de contar-ho perquè no hi és. Una bona indigesta de tòpics és el que hi trobaràs.
Ja ni em poso a mencionar certs detalls i situacions inversemblants que qualsevol que hagi viscut en un entorn rural sap que són més que improbables, el qual fa que et costi creure al personatge. Crítica social? És cert, n'hi ha, però parlant dels mateixos temes que ja hem llegit abans i contat com s'ha contat milions de vegades, zero originalitats en la forma de fer-ho.
Crec que és un text al qual se li hauria de demanar molt més, perquè es tracta d'una autora consolidada, bona i pot fer-ho molt millor. La novel·la tindrà una gran operació de màrqueting i tot el que vulguis, però em sembla un bluf, d'aquelles que oblides al cap de poques setmanes. Una lectura absolutament prescindible, i com he dit, em sap greu perquè tenia moltes ganes de llegir-la i gaudir-la, però també vull ser sincer a l'hora de donar la meva opinió.
La realitat és que em vaig avorrir des de l'inici, tot i que vaig ser pacient esperant que la història millorés. Però res de res, ben al contrari, a mesura que avança t'adones que ni tan sols el fil conductor de tot —el desig d'un embaràs— es tanca adequadament, ho fa de forma precipitada i poc o gens creïble. És la típica —i repetida fins a no poder més— història de: dona angoixada i cansada del ritme de vida actual a la gran ciutat acaba fugint a un entorn rural per retrobar-se. Res de nou, i tampoc busquis originalitat en la manera de contar-ho perquè no hi és. Una bona indigesta de tòpics és el que hi trobaràs.
Ja ni em poso a mencionar certs detalls i situacions inversemblants que qualsevol que hagi viscut en un entorn rural sap que són més que improbables, el qual fa que et costi creure al personatge. Crítica social? És cert, n'hi ha, però parlant dels mateixos temes que ja hem llegit abans i contat com s'ha contat milions de vegades, zero originalitats en la forma de fer-ho.
Crec que és un text al qual se li hauria de demanar molt més, perquè es tracta d'una autora consolidada, bona i pot fer-ho molt millor. La novel·la tindrà una gran operació de màrqueting i tot el que vulguis, però em sembla un bluf, d'aquelles que oblides al cap de poques setmanes. Una lectura absolutament prescindible, i com he dit, em sap greu perquè tenia moltes ganes de llegir-la i gaudir-la, però també vull ser sincer a l'hora de donar la meva opinió.
February 2, 2024
Like previous entries in Eva Baltasar’s thematically-linked trilogy, the title represents the nature and predicament of a nameless narrator. She’s a queer university researcher in her mid-twenties, driven by an all-consuming desire to be pregnant, not to be a mother but to experience the bodily sensations that culminate in birth. At first her days are spent visiting nursing homes, interviewing elderly occupants, fascinated by the ways in which their physical decline, their inevitable progression towards illness and death is masked by their sanitised surroundings. People who become symbols of where the narrator might also end up. Then her university contract expires, and she’s forced to take on a series of low-paid, exhausting jobs; and starts to feel like the captives, she hears from her Barcelona apartment, slowly rotting in the nearby zoo. Her attempts to conceive also lead nowhere. So, she makes a radical change and leaves for the countryside. In the city she’s a mammoth, an extinct creature destined to be hunted out of existence but perhaps beyond its walls she can regain the mammoth’s legendary strength.
The narrator’s move brings her to an isolated, mountain dwelling. She ekes out a living waiting tables in a nearby town while her closest neighbour, an aging shepherd, schools her in a form of self-sufficiency. Although his method includes cleaning his house and, later, fucking him for extra cash. Although Baltasar’s novel’s been compared to Thoreau, hers is no rural idyll that sparks a broader set of philosophical realisations. Instead, country life is harsh, riddled with violence, albeit free from the suffocating demands of the city and the capitalist ideals that fuel it. Just as the narrator’s surroundings can result in the formation of new life, it also steeps her in killing: from the lambs she rears from the shepherd’s surplus to the stray cats she slaughters in cruel but ingenious ways. Perhaps this brutality is why critics have traced connections between Baltasar’s story and Caterina Albert aka Victor Català’s classic, Catalan novel Solitude an equally-brutal vision of a woman’s life in rural Catalonia. But in Baltasar’s narrative, exhaustion, displacement and violence are coupled with moments of exquisite clarity, as the narrator focuses in on what is, or isn’t, essential to maintaining life.
Mammoth has a lot in common with previous instalments in Baltasar’s trilogy. Like them it’s told in the first person, the central character yet another queer loner, a woman out of step with the world around them. As before, Baltasar uses her narrator to reflect or explore aspects of her own identity, drawing on familiar spaces from her own past - she too left Barcelona at 24 but she was accompanied by her baby daughter, she too spent years living in a dilapidated, secluded house. Baltasar’s style remains ripe with complex imagery, a reminder of her origins as a poet, but deliberately stripped back this time. Her story too is fairly minimalist, there are few side characters or settings, her character has no developed history. There’s no indication of what led to their dissatisfaction, their thoughts or their feelings beyond their present moment. Part of this is because Baltasar is interested in the instinctual here, a self who acts on impulse, caught up in the bodily and the sensual, on testing themselves and working out their limits.
It’s a fascinating, fluid, thought-provoking piece. But despite the exploration of alienation through the narrator’s rejection of modern, urban existence, I experienced this as curiously conventional. Even though Baltasar steers clear of the bucolic - and demonstrates that total separation from social networks is ultimately impossible. Obviously, this is my personal interpretation of a fairly elliptical, enigmatic novel which I should probably revisit in the future. But I found the apparent failure to interrogate more fundamental assumptions about the relationship, for example, between human and non-human, between human and environment, profoundly disappointing. Baltasar’s narrator may be hyperaware of patriarchal oppression and her own economic exploitation but not that of other species. I couldn’t help making unfavourable comparisons to Marlen Haushofer’s ecofeminist vision in The Wall which also revolves around a woman and her dog carving out an existence in nature. I also found Baltasar’s conclusion frustrating, particularly its seeming reliance on notions of the overwhelming pull of the maternal. Translated by Julia Sanches.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher And Other Stories for an ARC
The narrator’s move brings her to an isolated, mountain dwelling. She ekes out a living waiting tables in a nearby town while her closest neighbour, an aging shepherd, schools her in a form of self-sufficiency. Although his method includes cleaning his house and, later, fucking him for extra cash. Although Baltasar’s novel’s been compared to Thoreau, hers is no rural idyll that sparks a broader set of philosophical realisations. Instead, country life is harsh, riddled with violence, albeit free from the suffocating demands of the city and the capitalist ideals that fuel it. Just as the narrator’s surroundings can result in the formation of new life, it also steeps her in killing: from the lambs she rears from the shepherd’s surplus to the stray cats she slaughters in cruel but ingenious ways. Perhaps this brutality is why critics have traced connections between Baltasar’s story and Caterina Albert aka Victor Català’s classic, Catalan novel Solitude an equally-brutal vision of a woman’s life in rural Catalonia. But in Baltasar’s narrative, exhaustion, displacement and violence are coupled with moments of exquisite clarity, as the narrator focuses in on what is, or isn’t, essential to maintaining life.
Mammoth has a lot in common with previous instalments in Baltasar’s trilogy. Like them it’s told in the first person, the central character yet another queer loner, a woman out of step with the world around them. As before, Baltasar uses her narrator to reflect or explore aspects of her own identity, drawing on familiar spaces from her own past - she too left Barcelona at 24 but she was accompanied by her baby daughter, she too spent years living in a dilapidated, secluded house. Baltasar’s style remains ripe with complex imagery, a reminder of her origins as a poet, but deliberately stripped back this time. Her story too is fairly minimalist, there are few side characters or settings, her character has no developed history. There’s no indication of what led to their dissatisfaction, their thoughts or their feelings beyond their present moment. Part of this is because Baltasar is interested in the instinctual here, a self who acts on impulse, caught up in the bodily and the sensual, on testing themselves and working out their limits.
It’s a fascinating, fluid, thought-provoking piece. But despite the exploration of alienation through the narrator’s rejection of modern, urban existence, I experienced this as curiously conventional. Even though Baltasar steers clear of the bucolic - and demonstrates that total separation from social networks is ultimately impossible. Obviously, this is my personal interpretation of a fairly elliptical, enigmatic novel which I should probably revisit in the future. But I found the apparent failure to interrogate more fundamental assumptions about the relationship, for example, between human and non-human, between human and environment, profoundly disappointing. Baltasar’s narrator may be hyperaware of patriarchal oppression and her own economic exploitation but not that of other species. I couldn’t help making unfavourable comparisons to Marlen Haushofer’s ecofeminist vision in The Wall which also revolves around a woman and her dog carving out an existence in nature. I also found Baltasar’s conclusion frustrating, particularly its seeming reliance on notions of the overwhelming pull of the maternal. Translated by Julia Sanches.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher And Other Stories for an ARC
March 2, 2025
Weird, offputting, gross, and full of reproductive gore. A woman who is broke and meandering finds herself on a farmstead and neck deep in sheep manure. There's a real dirty grittiness to this book, in both the imagery of the text and the way the narrative moves. Very enjoyable and a quick read that still manages to take you on a full journey with a weightiness to the story.
November 18, 2025
Ah Mammoth and your purple cover
I’m kinda glad now that you're over
Don’t get me wrong you’re a good book
I could not put you down but look
Your narrator’s completely mad
Murders cats with poison gas
Wants so bad to become pregnant
Sells her body to a peasant
Who’s neither charming nor even pleasant
Becomes her womb's unwanted tenant
—Isolated in the hills
To get away from city ills
You uncover the ways of nature
Which do not paint a pretty picture
Call me naive call me romantic
I like my lit somewhat less frantic
Ah Mammoth and your purple cover
You sure do have one cuckoo mother
September 26, 2024
The young narrator of this book is disenchanted with her life as a single person in the city. She longs for a baby, but when she fails to get pregnant, she makes a different massive life change by moving to the countryside. Her life becomes a cozy cottagecore dream…before things get very dark.
I loved this book. The author manages to pack so much plot within a short word count without things feeling rushed or disjointed. The protagonist is imperfect and a little bit unhinged in the absolute best way. This book made me feel so many emotions…it was a true roller coaster of a novella!
I loved this book. The author manages to pack so much plot within a short word count without things feeling rushed or disjointed. The protagonist is imperfect and a little bit unhinged in the absolute best way. This book made me feel so many emotions…it was a true roller coaster of a novella!
Read
August 24, 2025DNF@50%
#WIT Month
TW: Crueldade contra animais
A terceira parte do tríptico de Eva Baltasar tinha tudo para ser o meu preferido. A protagonista é o epítome do eremitismo, da contra-cultura, do anti-capitalismo, e a autora catalã transmite essas ideias sem facilitismo. Todas as críticas que li e ouvi davam a entender que tinham antipatizado com a protagonista, mas, fora a opção duvidosa de se enfiar na cama de desconhecidos incautos para que lhe façam um filho omitindo-lhes essa informação, eu estava completamente investida na sua história. Quando decide deixar a cidade e o emprego para alugar um casarão praticamente em ruínas no meio de nenhures, surge-lhe a questão dos gatos vadios, porque ela não é apreciadora dos ditos. Afinal, diz ela, não quer ser uma daquelas mulheres desprezíveis que sabem o nome de 50 gatos. Claro que não, que vergonha, ela prefere ser a exterminadora de gatos, porque Eva Baltasar acha que é a psicopatia que confere carisma a uma personagem.
Para se livrar deles, pede, então, conselhos ao vizinho, que é pastor, vive num esterqueiro e come borrego todos os dias apesar de sofrer de gota de forma calamitosa; portanto, a esperteza e o progresso em forma de gente.
Não fiquei para ver que outros horrores me estariam reservados.
Pergunto-me se a intenção da autora é apenas chocar ou mostrar que o campo não é um local bucólico para onde fogem os citadinos. Também eu o sou e sei que viver no campo traz outros desafios, como assisti durante a infância em todas as férias que passei com os meus avós na Beira Baixa, durante os anos 80. Este livro, no entanto, é contemporâneo, e as personagens não estão sequer a tentar controlar a natalidade da única forma que sabem. Trata-se do recurso a violência gratuita que não é essencial à trama de “Mammoth” nem ao desenvolvimento das suas personagens. Já vamos a um quarto do século XXI, não quero ver comportamentos do tempo das cavernas na minha ficção.
#WIT Month
TW: Crueldade contra animais
A terceira parte do tríptico de Eva Baltasar tinha tudo para ser o meu preferido. A protagonista é o epítome do eremitismo, da contra-cultura, do anti-capitalismo, e a autora catalã transmite essas ideias sem facilitismo. Todas as críticas que li e ouvi davam a entender que tinham antipatizado com a protagonista, mas, fora a opção duvidosa de se enfiar na cama de desconhecidos incautos para que lhe façam um filho omitindo-lhes essa informação, eu estava completamente investida na sua história. Quando decide deixar a cidade e o emprego para alugar um casarão praticamente em ruínas no meio de nenhures, surge-lhe a questão dos gatos vadios, porque ela não é apreciadora dos ditos. Afinal, diz ela, não quer ser uma daquelas mulheres desprezíveis que sabem o nome de 50 gatos. Claro que não, que vergonha, ela prefere ser a exterminadora de gatos, porque Eva Baltasar acha que é a psicopatia que confere carisma a uma personagem.
Para se livrar deles, pede, então, conselhos ao vizinho, que é pastor, vive num esterqueiro e come borrego todos os dias apesar de sofrer de gota de forma calamitosa; portanto, a esperteza e o progresso em forma de gente.
Não fiquei para ver que outros horrores me estariam reservados.
Pergunto-me se a intenção da autora é apenas chocar ou mostrar que o campo não é um local bucólico para onde fogem os citadinos. Também eu o sou e sei que viver no campo traz outros desafios, como assisti durante a infância em todas as férias que passei com os meus avós na Beira Baixa, durante os anos 80. Este livro, no entanto, é contemporâneo, e as personagens não estão sequer a tentar controlar a natalidade da única forma que sabem. Trata-se do recurso a violência gratuita que não é essencial à trama de “Mammoth” nem ao desenvolvimento das suas personagens. Já vamos a um quarto do século XXI, não quero ver comportamentos do tempo das cavernas na minha ficção.
Read
August 27, 2024Eva Baltasar is a remarkable artist who is able to weave sapphic and feminine themes into stories that explore belonging, hedonism, indecision, and the feeling—whether it be good or bad—of being untethered. Across just one hundred pages, Mammoth accomplishes all of this with harsh, electrifying prose that is translated with staggering force by Julia Sanchez.
My full thoughts: https://booksandbao.com/must-read-nov...
My full thoughts: https://booksandbao.com/must-read-nov...
November 25, 2024
4.5
Though the three narrators of Baltasar’s triptych (Permafrost and Boulder being the other two) are similar in superficial ways, their voices are distinct and I admire that immensely. When I discovered the works were “connected,” I wondered if I could or would compare them to Elena Ferrante’s first three standalones that feature different women having similar concerns at different stages of their lives. But I have to admit that’s it for my comparison.
If I’m forced to choose (and why should I be) I’d say that this is my favorite of the three and that’s due to the headlong prose and captivating voice of the narrator. I don’t expect that others might feel the same, especially as her sojourn into rural life turns increasingly and descriptively brutal. I didn’t find it over-the-top except for the way she gets rid of old and/or ill cats that city folks have selfishly dumped on the property she now lives on and takes care of. I’m still contemplating Baltasar’s reasons for this disturbing interlude and I’m guessing they are manifold and too much of a thematic spoiler to discuss here. But suffice to say rural living taps into and expands the narrator’s capabilities and it is increasingly not pretty, as well as realistic, I imagine.
The intense wish/need she has in the beginning, one she wants to accomplish basically alone, one that is not fulfilled in the city, is brought around to the end. I thought maybe moving away from the city, from her job interviewing elderly care patients, from living near trapped animals in a zoo, might solve that for her, though I’m happy to say (false) dichotomies are skewed here. As with Permafrost, I’m debating with myself over Baltasar’s conclusion (plot-wise); but as with Boulder, the ending is exquisitely written. All three narrators experience their own unique permafrost, but their inner cries are far from icy.
Though the three narrators of Baltasar’s triptych (Permafrost and Boulder being the other two) are similar in superficial ways, their voices are distinct and I admire that immensely. When I discovered the works were “connected,” I wondered if I could or would compare them to Elena Ferrante’s first three standalones that feature different women having similar concerns at different stages of their lives. But I have to admit that’s it for my comparison.
If I’m forced to choose (and why should I be) I’d say that this is my favorite of the three and that’s due to the headlong prose and captivating voice of the narrator. I don’t expect that others might feel the same, especially as her sojourn into rural life turns increasingly and descriptively brutal. I didn’t find it over-the-top except for the way she gets rid of old and/or ill cats that city folks have selfishly dumped on the property she now lives on and takes care of. I’m still contemplating Baltasar’s reasons for this disturbing interlude and I’m guessing they are manifold and too much of a thematic spoiler to discuss here. But suffice to say rural living taps into and expands the narrator’s capabilities and it is increasingly not pretty, as well as realistic, I imagine.
The intense wish/need she has in the beginning, one she wants to accomplish basically alone, one that is not fulfilled in the city, is brought around to the end. I thought maybe moving away from the city, from her job interviewing elderly care patients, from living near trapped animals in a zoo, might solve that for her, though I’m happy to say (false) dichotomies are skewed here. As with Permafrost, I’m debating with myself over Baltasar’s conclusion (plot-wise); but as with Boulder, the ending is exquisitely written. All three narrators experience their own unique permafrost, but their inner cries are far from icy.
May 15, 2024
If you liked Boulder but wanted it to be a little bit more unhinged then you will really enjoy Mammoth. The main character in this book is desperate to get pregnant so she can become a single mother and we follow her various attempts at getting this done. She is a really cold and unforgiving narrator and speaks almost like she is bored of the world and will only feel gratitude once she gets pregnant. I loved how it was written and how dark it got at some points - it was as though this booked touched on all the depraved gaps that Boulder left out in how tender her previous book felt.
So many people are going on about Claire Keegan's short fiction being ground-breaking but Baltasar's equally short fiction is where it's at. She is so much edgier and her narrator's always have a cool and distinct voice. Definitely need to get to Permafrost soon.
So many people are going on about Claire Keegan's short fiction being ground-breaking but Baltasar's equally short fiction is where it's at. She is so much edgier and her narrator's always have a cool and distinct voice. Definitely need to get to Permafrost soon.
September 29, 2024
"On the day I planned to get pregnant, I turned twenty-four and threw a birthday party that was actually a fertilization party in disguise."
Never a dull moment with Eva Baltasar... Her main characters are unadapted, misanthropic young women who reject society. They are just as dirty, annoyed, horny and repulsive as men usually are in novels. If you like Sara Mesa, Lina Wolff or even Han Kang, you will probably enjoy this too but in a sense it goes one step further.
In 'Mammoth' - the final instalment of a triptych - Baltasar explores the theme of motherhood, via a protagonist that leaves everything behind, settles in an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and strips her life back to the bare necessities.
By letting her behave contrary to societal norms (related to motherhood, but also to gender in general) Baltasar makes you constantly question these norms.
I found it not only very effective, but also very well-written.
Never a dull moment with Eva Baltasar... Her main characters are unadapted, misanthropic young women who reject society. They are just as dirty, annoyed, horny and repulsive as men usually are in novels. If you like Sara Mesa, Lina Wolff or even Han Kang, you will probably enjoy this too but in a sense it goes one step further.
In 'Mammoth' - the final instalment of a triptych - Baltasar explores the theme of motherhood, via a protagonist that leaves everything behind, settles in an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and strips her life back to the bare necessities.
By letting her behave contrary to societal norms (related to motherhood, but also to gender in general) Baltasar makes you constantly question these norms.
I found it not only very effective, but also very well-written.
August 24, 2024
On the day I planned to get pregnant, I turned twenty-four and threw a birthday party that was actually a fertilization party in disguise. My flatmates helped. They called their friends and acquaintances, and I asked my friends to bring acquaintances of their own. The more the merrier. I needed bodies. To gather a crowd, the kind of horde where epic gestures go unnoticed. I wanted to be a single mother, for no father to claim his share. It was April, and the spring sun shattered the window with a strong gust of suspended life. That white-hot glow made me feel fertile. I downed it like medicine, trusting in it and its power to transform my womb into a chapel.
Mammoth is Julia Sanches's translation of Mamut by Eva Baltasar, the third in a tripytch, although not a trilogy, of novels after (in their English translations and with links to my reviews) Permafrost and Boulder.
The unnamed narrator is, when the novel opens, living in Barcelona, near Parc de la Ciutadella and the city zoo, and working as a research group in the university's Demography of Longevity department, interviewing residents of nursing homes.
A lesbian, she nevertheless decides to sleep with a random male guest at a party she hosts for that purpose, with the aim of getting pregnant, although it's the act of creating a baby that motivates her, not the desire to have a child:
It wasn’t the desire to have a baby that took me hostage so much as the desire to gestate, to have life course through my body, to create. To do this, I’d have to break out of my cage. It was as though my only option were to flee. As if there were no such thing as salvation, only the woolen fossils of the past.
That proves unsuccessful, and when the research work ends turns to a succession of low-paid, menial jobs, typically lasting days, leaving each at the point she gets the hang of them, terrified I would become used to the exploitation, before she leaves the city and moves to a remote area in the mountains, encountering perhaps for the first time, nature.
The woods. The first time I went there, I felt exposed. Even though the trail from the inn is hedged by plant life, it's easy to tell when you've made it to the forest. That's when I realize the trees are gossiping about me in a language I can't understand. I find colonies unnerving, whether human, plant, or animal, and this many trees choosing to live side by side - trunks seemingly set apart and yet banded together by their roots and branches - is clearly suspicious. And all that foliage strewn on the ground. All the strange leaves. All the shadows, the chittering and warbling, all that authenticity. Every now and then I walk through capsules of silence, and it's like I've just set foot in a house whose owner is watching and could kill me if they wanted. The forest has hands and holds them over my eyes. It spins me around until I'm dizzy. It goads me to run, claws at me, then sends me falling. I've never fallen so much in my life. I trip on roots that jut out from the forest floor, I trip on hidden rocks, I step in holes and twist my ankle before falling yet again. My chin is scraped from kissing the ground countless times. I go through hell and find it thrilling. I can't get enough of this feeling - of my heart pulling the trigger and shooting.
There after some time in an inn-cum-monastery, where she seduces, or tries to, some of the female and male guests alike, she rents a run-down and inaccessible farmhouse, 10km from the nearest town, the last 3km of which is on a cartway only accessible with difficulty by her car.
There she lives a rather distorted version of the pastoral life, her only real companions, apart from passing hikers, a stray dog she adopts and her nearest neighbour, albeit 3km away, a shepherd, for who she first works as a cleaner before something extraordinary happened: the shepherd asked me to be his whore, in return for company, money, survival advice and an abundant supply of lamb.
This was perhaps the least successful of the triptych for me. Sanches's translation of Baltasar's prose is as striking as ever, and our narrator is another fascinating character, but felt more a collection of character traits than a coherent whole. 3.5 stars rounded to 3 due to my high expectations for the novel.
Mammoth is Julia Sanches's translation of Mamut by Eva Baltasar, the third in a tripytch, although not a trilogy, of novels after (in their English translations and with links to my reviews) Permafrost and Boulder.
The unnamed narrator is, when the novel opens, living in Barcelona, near Parc de la Ciutadella and the city zoo, and working as a research group in the university's Demography of Longevity department, interviewing residents of nursing homes.
A lesbian, she nevertheless decides to sleep with a random male guest at a party she hosts for that purpose, with the aim of getting pregnant, although it's the act of creating a baby that motivates her, not the desire to have a child:
It wasn’t the desire to have a baby that took me hostage so much as the desire to gestate, to have life course through my body, to create. To do this, I’d have to break out of my cage. It was as though my only option were to flee. As if there were no such thing as salvation, only the woolen fossils of the past.
That proves unsuccessful, and when the research work ends turns to a succession of low-paid, menial jobs, typically lasting days, leaving each at the point she gets the hang of them, terrified I would become used to the exploitation, before she leaves the city and moves to a remote area in the mountains, encountering perhaps for the first time, nature.
The woods. The first time I went there, I felt exposed. Even though the trail from the inn is hedged by plant life, it's easy to tell when you've made it to the forest. That's when I realize the trees are gossiping about me in a language I can't understand. I find colonies unnerving, whether human, plant, or animal, and this many trees choosing to live side by side - trunks seemingly set apart and yet banded together by their roots and branches - is clearly suspicious. And all that foliage strewn on the ground. All the strange leaves. All the shadows, the chittering and warbling, all that authenticity. Every now and then I walk through capsules of silence, and it's like I've just set foot in a house whose owner is watching and could kill me if they wanted. The forest has hands and holds them over my eyes. It spins me around until I'm dizzy. It goads me to run, claws at me, then sends me falling. I've never fallen so much in my life. I trip on roots that jut out from the forest floor, I trip on hidden rocks, I step in holes and twist my ankle before falling yet again. My chin is scraped from kissing the ground countless times. I go through hell and find it thrilling. I can't get enough of this feeling - of my heart pulling the trigger and shooting.
There after some time in an inn-cum-monastery, where she seduces, or tries to, some of the female and male guests alike, she rents a run-down and inaccessible farmhouse, 10km from the nearest town, the last 3km of which is on a cartway only accessible with difficulty by her car.
There she lives a rather distorted version of the pastoral life, her only real companions, apart from passing hikers, a stray dog she adopts and her nearest neighbour, albeit 3km away, a shepherd, for who she first works as a cleaner before something extraordinary happened: the shepherd asked me to be his whore, in return for company, money, survival advice and an abundant supply of lamb.
This was perhaps the least successful of the triptych for me. Sanches's translation of Baltasar's prose is as striking as ever, and our narrator is another fascinating character, but felt more a collection of character traits than a coherent whole. 3.5 stars rounded to 3 due to my high expectations for the novel.
August 10, 2022
Una dona de ciutat que desitja viure al camp, en la seva versió més crua i arcaica imaginable. Una dona amb la fecundació i la gestació com a objectiu vital. Un mas aïllat, un pastor com a veí i únic amic. Tots aquests elements conflueixen a Mamut, on la vida salvatge esdevé l'epicentre, explorant els límits de la humanitat, gairebé. Un aprenentatge constant per sobreviure amb allò que tens, deixant de banda la moral i el què diran.
Mamut tanca l'especial tríptic d'Eva Baltasar, format per tres llibres breus i independents que no comparteixen cap aspecte de la trama. Sí que hi ha, però, aquest nexe femení que uneix les tres entregues: dones fortes, amb una relació d'amor-odi intensa envers la vida i la maternitat, que ens fan viure les seves pors i certeses d'una manera brutal, animal i fins i tot violenta. De vegades el sexe és només sexe, viscut i explicat com un tràmit. També pot ser dolç i viu. O sec, ràpid, desacomplexat. I la maternitat, caleidoscòpica, amb les seves llums i ombres, també es presenta des de tots les seves vessants. Gestar, criar i cuidar, els quals se solen considerar un pack indissociable, Baltasar els destrossa i els converteix en peces d'un puzzle que no necessàriament acaben encaixant.
Dins del meu rànquing personal, Permagel encapçalaria la llista, seguit de Mamut, i segurament Boulder seria el que menys em va convèncer. M'ha agradat llegir a Eva Baltasar, sobretot per la manera descarnada de descriure els sentiments, però també per la bellesa dels espais i l'essència feréstega de tot plegat, en perfecta harmonia amb les protagonistes. Si bé com ja he dit altres vegades la maternitat no és un tema que gaudeixi especialment, aquest to tan especial, aquestes ganes de sentir dir les coses pel seu nom i la brevetat de les obres han estat motius suficients per endinsar-m'hi.
(LAIA)
Mamut tanca l'especial tríptic d'Eva Baltasar, format per tres llibres breus i independents que no comparteixen cap aspecte de la trama. Sí que hi ha, però, aquest nexe femení que uneix les tres entregues: dones fortes, amb una relació d'amor-odi intensa envers la vida i la maternitat, que ens fan viure les seves pors i certeses d'una manera brutal, animal i fins i tot violenta. De vegades el sexe és només sexe, viscut i explicat com un tràmit. També pot ser dolç i viu. O sec, ràpid, desacomplexat. I la maternitat, caleidoscòpica, amb les seves llums i ombres, també es presenta des de tots les seves vessants. Gestar, criar i cuidar, els quals se solen considerar un pack indissociable, Baltasar els destrossa i els converteix en peces d'un puzzle que no necessàriament acaben encaixant.
Dins del meu rànquing personal, Permagel encapçalaria la llista, seguit de Mamut, i segurament Boulder seria el que menys em va convèncer. M'ha agradat llegir a Eva Baltasar, sobretot per la manera descarnada de descriure els sentiments, però també per la bellesa dels espais i l'essència feréstega de tot plegat, en perfecta harmonia amb les protagonistes. Si bé com ja he dit altres vegades la maternitat no és un tema que gaudeixi especialment, aquest to tan especial, aquestes ganes de sentir dir les coses pel seu nom i la brevetat de les obres han estat motius suficients per endinsar-m'hi.
(LAIA)
February 3, 2022
Dualitat. A nivell d'escriptura, com sempre, Baltasar no defrauda. Té força, té do de paraula d'imatge. De l'altra banda, la història no m'ha apel·lat tan a nivell personal com altres vegades.
October 4, 2025
My fave of the trilogy. A bit more pastoral this time.
August 6, 2024
‘Mammoth’ certainly settles the discussion if ever there was one, Eva Baltasar is an exceptional writer. With recommendations on the book’s back cover from Pedro Almodóvar and Fernanda Melchor, it’s entirely easy to agree with their praise of this highly original, unconventional and unique Catalan writer.
The long awaited third title in the triptych which also includes ‘Permafrost’ and ‘Boulder’, I think this one is perhaps my favourite, with ‘Permafrost’ a very close second. The three books I think could be read in any order, but having now read all three I would suggest sticking to order in which they were published.
Praise must also be given to Julia Sanches’ excellent translations, as anyone who regularly reads international works translated into English knows, this is often the deal clincher or breaker. Again here in ‘Mammoth’, as with the other two titles, Sanches has done an excellent job and succeeds in making the reader feel that we are reading in the work’s original language.
The long awaited third title in the triptych which also includes ‘Permafrost’ and ‘Boulder’, I think this one is perhaps my favourite, with ‘Permafrost’ a very close second. The three books I think could be read in any order, but having now read all three I would suggest sticking to order in which they were published.
Praise must also be given to Julia Sanches’ excellent translations, as anyone who regularly reads international works translated into English knows, this is often the deal clincher or breaker. Again here in ‘Mammoth’, as with the other two titles, Sanches has done an excellent job and succeeds in making the reader feel that we are reading in the work’s original language.
July 26, 2022
Leer esto tan corto para mi fue rápida no la he podido disfrutar, os lo puedo asegurar que ha sido muy decepcionante. En mi humilde opinión a sido muy real, pero en parte cruel, hace que el lector se imagine ciertas cosas inhumanas y comportamientos dignos de una persona con problemas mentales psíquicos.
Si hablamos del contenido, ha dejado bastante que desear. A poca gente le gusta leer según qué a través de un libro. Hubo un punto y a parte en el que ya di por perdida la novela. En definitiva, no me ha gustado para nada.
Si hablamos del contenido, ha dejado bastante que desear. A poca gente le gusta leer según qué a través de un libro. Hubo un punto y a parte en el que ya di por perdida la novela. En definitiva, no me ha gustado para nada.
February 27, 2022
L'he llegit d'una tirada; començat i acabat. I m'ha agardat potser el que més del tríptic. Hi ha alguna cosa en l'escriptura afilada de l'Eva Baltasar que et fa encadenar una paraula amb una altra sense poder aixecar els ulls del llibre.
March 27, 2023
El més fluix dels tres, pense. No m’ha agradat especialment com tracta la muntanya i el món rural, estic un poc farta de que la vida a la natura o al camp siga sinònim de desquici o locura.
June 3, 2022
Si el objetivo de la autora era generar repulsión y desagrado deberían ir las 5 estrellas. Un relato detallado y muy bien escrito, pero el contenido me resultó de a ratos indignante. SIN VENIR A CUENTO SE MATAN TRES GATOS! Imperdonable para mí.
July 16, 2024
I liked Baltasar’s first two books of the trilogy so just had to read this final one as well. I found it more accessible and straightforward, and therefore maybe a tiny bit less interesting than the other two, but still a great read!
Thank you And Other Stories and Edelweiss for the ARC.
Thank you And Other Stories and Edelweiss for the ARC.
January 4, 2025
For anyone who’s ever wanted to jump in their car and escape the restraints of life with just the basics, and isn’t afraid of dirt and grime. The Eva Baltasar and Julia Sanches writer-translator combo is nothing short of perfect.
January 12, 2026
Stop bating people into reading ‘queer’ stories when the characters behave solely through a heterosexual lens it’s really tiresome.
Clearly I’m missing something given Balthasar is a lesbian but I just feel this is a well written toxic bombshell? Maybe that’s the point and maybe this just isn’t for me. I just do not like a character that moves past having no redeeming qualities and is just a shitty person. Especially when that’s the only narrative you’re forced to follow and 99% of the people in the book are even shittier than her. I don’t want to feel sorry for her but I want to empathise with her and the trials and tribulations of her life, what she wants, what she doesn’t. I want to be ok judging her mistakes because I know I’d make them. I don’t want to hate her then be forced into feeling some form of guilt for hating her cause something awful happens it’s just very frustrating.
It’s so clear the author is beyond talented and maybe one day I’ll try some of her poetry. The glimmers of the desolation of human experience here are profound, relatable and grounding in an often toxic and confusing headache.
I think if you’re a quick reader you’ll be fine with this one but as a slow reader this wasn’t it for me at all.
Clearly I’m missing something given Balthasar is a lesbian but I just feel this is a well written toxic bombshell? Maybe that’s the point and maybe this just isn’t for me. I just do not like a character that moves past having no redeeming qualities and is just a shitty person. Especially when that’s the only narrative you’re forced to follow and 99% of the people in the book are even shittier than her. I don’t want to feel sorry for her but I want to empathise with her and the trials and tribulations of her life, what she wants, what she doesn’t. I want to be ok judging her mistakes because I know I’d make them. I don’t want to hate her then be forced into feeling some form of guilt for hating her cause something awful happens it’s just very frustrating.
It’s so clear the author is beyond talented and maybe one day I’ll try some of her poetry. The glimmers of the desolation of human experience here are profound, relatable and grounding in an often toxic and confusing headache.
I think if you’re a quick reader you’ll be fine with this one but as a slow reader this wasn’t it for me at all.
April 20, 2022
Potser hi tenia unes grans expectatives (Permagel i Boulder em van encantar), però per mi, Mamut és amb diferència el llibre més fluix dels tres.
No he arribat a empatitzar amb el personatge ni he entès molts dels seus pensaments i accions. Malgrat això, és una història curta i àgil de llegir.
No he arribat a empatitzar amb el personatge ni he entès molts dels seus pensaments i accions. Malgrat això, és una història curta i àgil de llegir.
February 18, 2025
the fantastic writing cannot make up for this horrible narrative
November 7, 2025
*Rezension: Mammut von Eva Baltasar*
Ich habe "Mammut" von Eva Balthasar gelesen und muss sagen, dass ich zwiespältig bin. Der Schreibstil hat mich wirklich angesprochen und an manchen Stellen hat mich das Buch auch richtig gepackt, insbesondere das Ende hat mich sehr berührt.
Allerdings muss ich zugeben, dass ich nicht ganz verstanden habe, was das Buch mir eigentlich sagen wollte. Es gab einige Passagen, die ich einfach nicht richtig einordnen konnte und die mich ein bisschen verwirrt haben. Vielleicht lag es auch an mir, dass ich nicht ganz in die Geschichte reingekommen bin.
Trotz allem denke ich, dass es ein Buch ist, das man vielleicht noch einmal lesen sollte, um es besser zu verstehen. Vielleicht entdecke ich beim zweiten Lesen noch mehr Tiefe und Bedeutung, die mir beim ersten Mal entgangen ist.
Insgesamt gebe ich dem Buch 3 von 5 Sternen. Es ist ein Buch, das mich nicht ganz überzeugt hat, aber ich denke, dass es für Leser, die sich auf diese Art von Literatur gerne einlassen, durchaus interessant sein könnte.
Vielleicht sollte ich es einfach noch einmal später versuchen…
Ich habe "Mammut" von Eva Balthasar gelesen und muss sagen, dass ich zwiespältig bin. Der Schreibstil hat mich wirklich angesprochen und an manchen Stellen hat mich das Buch auch richtig gepackt, insbesondere das Ende hat mich sehr berührt.
Allerdings muss ich zugeben, dass ich nicht ganz verstanden habe, was das Buch mir eigentlich sagen wollte. Es gab einige Passagen, die ich einfach nicht richtig einordnen konnte und die mich ein bisschen verwirrt haben. Vielleicht lag es auch an mir, dass ich nicht ganz in die Geschichte reingekommen bin.
Trotz allem denke ich, dass es ein Buch ist, das man vielleicht noch einmal lesen sollte, um es besser zu verstehen. Vielleicht entdecke ich beim zweiten Lesen noch mehr Tiefe und Bedeutung, die mir beim ersten Mal entgangen ist.
Insgesamt gebe ich dem Buch 3 von 5 Sternen. Es ist ein Buch, das mich nicht ganz überzeugt hat, aber ich denke, dass es für Leser, die sich auf diese Art von Literatur gerne einlassen, durchaus interessant sein könnte.
Vielleicht sollte ich es einfach noch einmal später versuchen…
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