Mammoth
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
Mammoth's protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She's inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work – all in pursuit of life in the raw. This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar's wild voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the pulsing latest from Baltasar (Boulder), a Barcelona lesbian attempts to forge a new life in the Catalan countryside. The unnamed narrator, 24, is disillusioned by her sociology research job at a university ("Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime"), and hopes to sate her feeling of emptiness by getting pregnant ("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"). After a one-night stand fails to leave her pregnant, the narrator quits her job and cycles through a series of service gigs, then flees the city before becoming too accustomed to poor-paying and soulless work. She settles in an isolated farmhouse in the hills, where she's invigorated by the harsh winter and caring for the farm's animals, and she embarks on a friendship with a nearby shepherd. She stays for a year, having sex with the shepherd for money, until a sudden discovery disrupts her newfound peace. Baltasar's unsettling and poignant descriptions offer a slim yet profound meditation on finding what it takes for one to feel alive. This is striking.
