Poet Eva Baltasar, the author of ten volumes of poetry, is a Catalan bestseller, this short novel marks her fiction debut. Permafrost’s chapters follow an unnamed narrator from her adolescence to her forties while women remain the object of her desire throughout. Women in her family are curious about it: “What is it like to fuck a woman?” asks her aunt, and later her sister.
To the narrator, these straight (or straight-seeming) women seem strange strangely determined to deny themselves. She disdains them for it “ being the bearer of important news the only climax Mom has ever known” and struggles with the sentimentality they demand from her. When her sister, pregnant with a second child, asks if she’s “excited,” the narrator responds, “It’s so amazing to be an aunt twice over it’s like being a full-fledged aunt like going from wearing a monocle to wearing a pair of glasses or from riding a tricycle to riding a bicycle.”
The narrator is interested in reading as well as sex. She moves from rural Scotland to Belgium then back to Barcelona, indulging in both with languidly image-rich prose. Lovers have hair like “bundles of fiber optics” and calves that are “compact like thinking skulls.” We’re given decadent and gloopy half-metaphors such as, “pleasure whose epicentre was the word ‘Camembert.’” In one sentence, Baltasar brings us not just literal food-play sex but sex between women in general and also words and reading as joyful eroticism.
The narrator of Permafrost is also suicidal. Her will to die runs parallel with her want for women. And as the novel goes on, what looks like disdain for though she cares for them and shows up when they need help her mother, sister and nieces reveal itself as a wolf-howl against their heteronormative lives of drudgery, bad sex, and childbearing.
Suicidality is higher among queer people: 42% of LGBT people in the UK felt life wasn’t worth living at some point in the past year, according to a Stonewall survey. But queerness can be salvation. Permafrost shows this beautifully. It’s both that life is unbearable and also that words and sex specifically sex between women make the narrator feel the body joy of being alive within it.
Finally answering her sister’s question “What is it like to fuck a woman?” brings to mind The Great Escape for the narrator: digging a tunnel out of a German prisoner of war camp only to find you’re six meters short. So she says, ecstatically: “Being with a woman is like sticking your head out of the tunnel and discovering that you’ve actually dug through those last few meters.”
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