MAMMOTH

A young woman leaves Barcelona in search of the identity she believes she can find only in isolation.

On her 24th birthday, the narrator of this finely observed novel orchestrates a gathering that is “actually a fertilization party in disguise.” Since she was in college, she’s lived in an airy Barcelona apartment where she can hear the lions’ “ancient, roaring sorrows” from their cages in the nearby zoo, and now she works in a university position interviewing the elderly for a sociology study on longevity. Her colleagues view the data processing software they use in their work as an intermediary “spiritual guide” that will lead them to miracles of comprehension, but the narrator is overcome by “the desire to gestate, to have life course through [her] body, to create.” When her anonymous birthday coupling—her first with a man—doesn’t result in a pregnancy, she decides that, like the zoo animals, she is living her life in a cage. Thus, in “a rusty old Peugeot the size of an egg carton,” she sets off on a journey that takes her ever farther from the epicenters of human society until she ends up at Cal Llanut, an isolated farmhouse high in the mountains where she feels she will finally find the solitude she needs to live “cleaved to the rock like a root, sucking up nutrients until every finger, every tooth, every last one of [her] thoughts is worn through.” Meanwhile, her desire to have a child is as strong as ever, and those twin impulses—to isolate and to increase—fuel her in the pursuit of a kind of life that befits the austerity and self-reliance of her new landscape. At turns dazzling and brutally bitter, this slender volume refuses to clarify its intentions but rather allows its major themes an uneasy coexistence similar to the one the main character forges for herself. While this decision may frustrate readers looking for a comprehensive outcome to the speaker’s experiment in radical self-determination, Baltasar’s startling, poetic prose continues to sing long after the book has come to its indeterminate conclusions.

Ardent and intimate, a novel of physical and psychological vistas.