In the latest from lauded Catalan author Eva Baltasar, an animal desire is on the rise. Tired of the city, her studies, and the vacuity of contemporary life, the young protagonist of Mammoth seeks out a supposedly simpler provincial existence, and is willing to do anything to get there. Through both physical and psychological extremes, Baltasar’s heightened portrait is both shocking and absorbing, reflecting the chaos of an ego that vibrates with desire and spirals against expectation. The prose shivers with sensuality as this journey inward and outward carves its remarkable procession—the rampage of an unencumbered self, raging against the presumptions of civilised life.
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Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, And Other Stories, 2024
Following on the heels of the 2023 Booker-shortlisted Boulder, Eva Baltasar’s latest novel, Mammoth, seizes the reader in a vice grip from the opening page and doesn’t relent even after its final words; the ending, in fact, delivers the sharpest blow of all. The narrative is a raw and visceral exploration of a young woman who shatters the routine of her daily life, learning to dwell among the shards of a new form of existence. Using a rich vocabulary of metaphors and similes, Baltasar creates a fictional space that is confrontational, explosive, and evocative, demonstrating her masterful ability to delve into the psyches of queer women who find themselves on the fringes, and Julia Sanches’s translation from the Catalan deftly captures the novel’s unique tone and voice.
Through its title, Baltasar thematically links Mammoth to her other two novels translated into English, Permafrost and Boulder: all three suggest weight, immovability. The unnamed protagonist in Mammoth is twenty-four years old and dissatisfied with her life, especially her research job at a university, which involves interviewing residents in nursing homes. “I hated my tool,” she reflects, “the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people.” This threat of dehumanization threads its way through the prose, hovering beneath the surface of every encounter. It’s telling that on the first page, the narrator reveals that her bedroom window faces a zoo, establishing a proximity to an animalistic wildness that has been broken and contained, on display for public consumption and enjoyment—a metaphor for her perception of her own existence. Returning to the zoo later, she thinks, “The animals didn’t live there, they rotted there—just like the visitors and no more nor less than the zookeepers.”
Divided into three parts, the novel is condensed and compact, structured by a series of first-person, confessional vignettes that are in some ways reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. The narrator is unfiltered, uncouth, and unapologetic—at times lyrical and profound, and at others stark and stripped down. The first part, though short, paints a strikingly vivid portrait of her person, setting the scene for her decision to flee her urban life in Barcelona. In the second part, the longest of the total hundred-and-three pages, she moves into an abandoned house in the countryside and fights to adapt to a rural, rustic setting that is both hostile and dangerous. The final part is short, bookending the novel to form a triptych, but it’s the heaviest, building to a conclusion that haunts long after the silence of endings.
One primal impulse propels Mammoth forward: the protagonist’s desire to have a child. In its opening line, the novel orients its entire chronology around this fact: “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.” Baltasar immediately prioritizes the pregnancy plan over the birthday as the marker of significance: the promise of a future birth instead of the one being celebrated. Similarly, a few pages later, the protagonist marks her narration with the time stamp, “fertile window day one, midnight.” The philosopher Merleau-Ponty observed that “the body is the vehicle of being in the world,” and this insight dominates Baltasar’s novel.
This insistent need to become pregnant has no identifiable cause, and, especially in light of the protagonist’s general disenchantment, it is jarring—but she provides an explanation at the end of the first section: “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.” The zoo imagery returns here to demonstrate how the main character refuses to rot away in the enclosure of a mundane, meaningless existence. While she aligns her fantasy of reproduction with freedom, she acknowledges that she is captive to her own desire, a cage that is much harder to break. Baltasar so acutely captures the passionate spirit of a rebellious and nonconforming young woman and its perilous blind spots. There are tragic shades of Greek mythology here: a woman with a self-justified desire that will prove to be dark and destructive.
Indeed, the novel dramatizes that wanting and getting are two very different things. When the protagonist eventually realizes her goal and gets pregnant, she struggles to grapple with the consequences: “the loss of desire horrifies me.” The burning sense of need doesn’t disappear, but it ceases to be hers, as her unborn child transforms her into “a tool for its satisfaction.” This imagery recalls her earlier description of her data analysis as a tool that commits the crime of “reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet.” Now she is the instrument, and the novel, which has been drifting into the surreal throughout the course of its second part, veers directly into horror, nightmare.
In a moment once again reminiscent of Greek mythology, the narrator, a modern-day Pasiphae, remarks of a buck, “Sometimes I wish I was a goat too so I could fuck him,” and later, with a pseudo-Minotaur in her womb, she laments, “A grafting took place, and now a horrid, disproportionate lamb is growing in my uterus.” The language of grafting is also common in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in scenes of violent, unbidden transformation; it appears evocatively at the end of Salmacis’s and Hermaphroditus’s story, which describes the creation of the first intersex being. In Stephanie McCarter’s brilliant translation, Ovid describes the joining of their bodies “as when somebody grafts boughs onto bark and sees them meld together as they grow.” The product is unnatural, monstrous, inhuman. That the father is a shepherd only drives the point home; it is the violation of the pastoral, which was meant to be an escape from the suffering of “civilised” life.
While the main character is openly queer, her desire for pregnancy subsumes her desire for other women, which she nevertheless feels over the course of the novel. In fact, the impregnation becomes highly sexualized, as if to compensate for her sacrifice. She masturbates vigilantly, convinced that using her dildo is essential to her success: “Whenever I stop using it for a while, my vagina closes up as if I’d been born male and had just put one in surgically.” Her queerness is therefore subverted to the need for penetration, for insemination. It is even rejected or punished; when she kisses a girl at an inn, the latter momentarily reciprocates but then replies, “I’m not gay,” before retreating; later, when the narrator tries to kiss a beautiful woman she befriends, she finds herself slapped and thrown out of the house.
All of the novel’s sex scenes are with men and are purposefully written with animalistic language, to show the instinctual and aggressive nature of these heteronormative encounters. In the opening scene, at her fertilization party disguised as a birthday, she kisses a man for the first time. When they eventually have sex, it is traumatic for her, “a tedious, drawn-out, and turbulent event, like a stagecoach ride or a seizure. I wanted to make a run for it. I wanted to get pregnant.” As she waits for a second insemination opportunity, she describes him sleeping “like a sumptuous beast—a lion or cheetah. He was carnivorous, a fornicating male, and I was watching him regenerate,” and afterwards, he is “a heat-driven animal, a beast with aquatic muscles.” The spirit of the zoo has entered her bedroom: sex without pleasure, purely for the sake of regeneration, a blind but demanding impulse. This imagery returns later when she has a standoff with a man threatening her: “We locked eyes, and for a second we were like a pair of animals seeing each other for the first time, ready to go in for the kill.”
Mammoth’s protagonist seems to think she is in control of her encounters with men, however ambivalent she feels about them. They all become the same to her: “‘Any one of them would do’—a phrase I attack myself with and have to endure… Right now, any one of my species would do.” The novel raises the question: in using sex with men for her own ends, is she engaging in an empowered feminist gesture—a reversal of the usual stereotype—or a fantasy that betrays her naivete? When she makes an arrangement with a local man, she casually remarks, “I whored myself out today, and everything went smoothly.” But in the world Baltasar crafts, violence and sex are always intertwined. In an act of self-defence, the narrator eventually hits the man with a frying pan; fleeing the scene, she sits in the hay and masturbates until she comes like never before.
Over the course of the novel, she discovers what she is capable of, both in terms of resilience and strength, but also brutality. As she submerges herself further into her environment, she becomes hubristic in her confidence, again channeling the Greek tragic paradigm. “What authority can the written law possibly have over me?” she boasts. She wants to “seem normal but be barbaric,” having retreated from the conventions of social life. In a particularly unsettling scene, she plots to—and eventually succeeds in—murdering the stray cats that overrun her house, and this self-knowledge proves simultaneously disturbing and enthralling: “The next day I am not myself. I’ve taken a few steps back along a set of coordinates. It’s like I don’t know where I’m from, like I’m getting to know myself, which is frightening but also inspires an unusual pride.”
Encountering the hostility of her environment, the protagonist discovers an eroticism of daily life, finding rebirth through pain by transubstantiating her suffering into ecstasy. It’s no accident that religious motifs appear often, as when she nurses baby goats and lambs, and falls asleep in a manger. In moments of adversity, she feels exhilaration and excitement, comparing herself to a freshly washed newborn, and finds solace in lack, hating herself for liking the taste of expensive cookies someone gives her: “The phrase to do without may be the thing that frees me.” Throwing off the comforts of her former routine, she adopts the position of an ascetic: “I want life to mow me down, to feel its hand on the nape of my neck. For it to make me swallow dirt while I breathe. Because—because feeling alive means shouldering the burden, now that I know I can bear the weight.”
Mammoth is bold, testing the limits of the reader’s comfort and probing the depths of a character who offers herself to us with unapologetic candour. It is not for the faint of heart, but the novel will reward those who, like its protagonist, can adapt to a difficult world and affirm what pain can teach us, how it can transform us. As she strips everything away from her life, she comes to learn a valuable lesson that carries with it a new form of weight: “Nothing is mine, except for me.”
Hilary Ilkay is an Associate Fellow in the Early Modern Studies Program at the University of King’s College. She is a Managing Editor for the Simone de Beauvoir Studies Journal and an Assistant Managing Editor for Asymptote.
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