Eva Baltasar’s “Mammoth” is a book of contradictions even before it begins. Despite its title, it is seemingly a featherweight, not a giant, clocking in at hardly 100 pages. But this is a surprising slim novel that trembles with the force of an approaching stampede.
Its young, unnamed narrator has a job interviewing nursing home residents, “those people who, at the end of the day, had somehow persuaded life to put up with them all those years,” for a research project. Working to catalog the regrets and decrepitude of old age drives her toward a new interest in the here and now, and a new respect for her own youthful body. She decides that for her 24th birthday, she will give herself a life-changing gift: At the party in her Barcelona flat-share, she will conceive.
She seduces a man, despite her queerness, and endures the coupling in service of her greater destiny. “It was a tedious, drawn-out and turbulent event, like a stagecoach ride or a seizure,” she observes, in the novel’s characteristic style — at once deadpan, devastating and deliciously specific.
Unlike in some novels of women’s longing, in “Mammoth” it is not exactly motherhood that tempts the narrator; it is pregnancy. Her desire is more bodily than maternal, more creative than practical, and her plans force her to fight against her deep contempt for other people, particularly men. This is the first of the novel’s binary stars of intense and conflicting impulses: to isolate and to reproduce at once.
But one desire is more easily fulfilled than the other. Frustrated by her initial failure to conceive, and by the many small assaults on her dignity in a world of low-paid but all-consuming work, of disappointing crushes and high rent and little joy, our narrator leaves the city and negotiates a new life in a crumbling farmhouse in a rural mountain hamlet. There’s nothing idyllic about it — soon she is broke, hungry and anticipating freezing in the winter, while waging war against a phalanx of feral cats.
In this harsh new reality, she quickly learns the small pleasures of hard work and the freedom of a certain type of domesticity. (“My first batch of bread was a failure, but I ate the whole thing. And that makes it a success,” she declares.) The lesson is reinforced by her closest neighbor, an older shepherd who has seemingly mastered his own small art of isolation. But his hallowed qualities — he offers her work cleaning his home, lamb from his flock for lunches, lessons in necessities like wood splitting — are anchored in an animalistic existence, a harbinger of what the narrator herself might be reduced to.
Then again, his brutishness inspires her: “I want to be just like the shepherd,” she says, “to seem normal but be barbaric.” This gets at the second set of conflicting impulses in “Mammoth.” The narrator craves destruction and discomfort, yet revels in her own minor triumphs at staying alive amid the wildness.
The novel’s themes and the narrator’s palpable desires might feel contradictory, but only in the ways that life always is. Wants are irrational, and decisions are made out of necessity; there aren’t easy answers to conflicting cravings. The narrator’s want for a child only intensifies as her life is distilled to its difficult new essence. Baltasar’s sharp and forthright prose (adeptly translated by Julia Sanches) demonstrates how much can lie within one person, through the boiling, enraged voice of the narrator. She is angry at men, at climate, at neighbors, at society. When a storm approaches, she observes: “I wait for the tornado as if I were going to marry it. I want life to mow me down.”
Seasons in the country pass, and she continues to attempt to get pregnant when she can, all while finding delights in her newfound hardness, and all while her successes and deprivations build toward an abrupt and haunting end, a reconsideration of all she has wanted. “An ancient version of me has awakened,” she notices, “a fossilized self that now beckons.”
A study in the immensity of arcane privacy and longing, as well as the many ways humans can exploit one another and the natural world, Baltasar’s novel howls to ask: What is a life made according to one’s own rules? A quiet but hard-staring fighter of a book, “Mammoth” is, in a world doomed to end, one woman’s strange and powerful cry against her own extinction.
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