Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only €10,99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Mammoth
    Mammoth
    Mammoth
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Mammoth

    By Eva Baltasar

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnd Other Stories
    Release dateAug 6, 2024
    ISBN9781916751019
    Mammoth
    Author

    Eva Baltasar

    Already an acclaimed poet, with ten volumes of poetry to her name, Eva Baltasar’s debut novel Permafrost received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for France’s 2020 Prix Médicis for Best Foreign Book. Boulder‘s English translation was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. The author lives in a Catalonian village near the mountains.

    Related to Mammoth

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for Mammoth

    4/5

    2 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Mammoth - Eva Baltasar

      cover.jpg

      First published in 2024 by And Other Stories

      Sheffield – London – New York

      www.andotherstories.org

      Originally published in Catalan as Mamut in 2022.

      Copyright © Club Editor, 2022.

      All rights reserved by and controlled through Club Editor.This edition c/o SalmaiaLit, Literary Agency.

      Translation copyright © Julia Sanches, 2024.

      The rights of Eva Baltasar to be identified as the author of this work and of Julia Sanches to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted.

      ISBN: 9781916751002

      eBook ISBN: 9781916751019

      Editor: Tara Tobler; Copy-editor: Robina Pelham Burn; Proofreader: Madeleine Rogers; Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

      ; Cover Design: Anna Morrison.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

      The translation of this book from Catalan has been partially funded by the Consortium of the Institut Ramon Llull, and partially funded by the support of a grant from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme, which is supported by Arts Council England.

      An idea hungers for your body.

      Les Murray,

      Subhuman Redneck Poems

      ONE

      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. My flatmates helped. They called their friends and acquaintances, and I asked my friends to bring acquaintances of their own. The more the merrier. I needed bodies. To gather a crowd, the kind of horde where epic gestures go unnoticed. I wanted to be a single mother, for no father to claim his share. It was April, and the spring sun shattered the window with a strong gust of suspended life. That white-hot glow made me feel fertile. I downed it like medicine, trusting in it and its power to transform my womb into a chapel. After lunch I would lie on the futon in my bedroom, head against the window that faces the zoo, and surrender to the light that turned my skin golden, my arm hair the color of wheat, my legs dissolute and slack. I masturbated in the sun while longing for a child. The singing of caged birds lulled me to sleep, and I woke around sundown, when the smooth quiet formed a slope down which the lions’ ancient, roaring sorrows would soon roll.

      At the time I was working in a research group at the university’s sociology department. Demography of Longevity, it was called. We were in the first and longest stage of our research: data collection. I spent whole mornings interviewing residents of adult day-care centres and nursing homes. The assignment felt unending and was often interrupted by coughing fits and phlegmy vomit. I almost never got them to answer the full survey in one session, which meant having to go back the following day. When I said goodbye, some of the seniors would keep me there, wringing my hands like they wanted to suck days out of my life – that slow sap that nourishes years. Twice, the next day was too late. It was a time of minor discoveries. The seniors died in their sleep, at night, shortly before dawn. Another thing: in nursing homes, they died in threes. A mystery but that’s how it went. No one is born alone. But when it comes to dying, bodies band together – like nations, or musketeers.

      Grant-funded jobs pay next to nothing, but I got on fine. In undergrad, I’d made friends with a PhD student, and we rented a flat near Parc de la Ciutadella with a couple of other girls. One of their fathers was the guarantor. All four of us moved in on the first day of our lease. We walked into the flat in silence, the way you might enter a crypt or visit the jeweler: with the incredulous smile of someone seeing generosity made concrete in walls. The rooms were assigned at random, and I got the smallest one. The plan was to swap every six months, but we never got around to it. We made ourselves at home in our respective rooms, rearranging the furniture, shedding strands of hair, and tempering our preferences, our skin. By the time I turned twenty-four, I was the only one left. I sublet the other rooms to exchange students and did all I could to avoid them. It made living with people more manageable. Outside those four walls, everything seemed to annoy me.

      The first thing I did every day before getting out of bed was throw open the window and breathe in the morning air. Then I wrapped myself in the duvet and lay there a few minutes. There’s something sacrilegious about Barcelona at daybreak. The city pounces on the still-pale light emerging from the deep sea and seizes it with its lucrative forceps. It’s the hour of alarm clocks and stimulants, of haste, slammed doors, and headaches. A massive apparatus spits and starts, and language keeps it well oiled – a rude, dispassionate language that perverts language’s original meaning. I woke to an awareness of that profanity. Then I showered, put on some clean clothes, and ate processed food. Outside, before descending into the metro station, I glanced up at the mountain and pictured taller, emptier, vaster ranges. I turned into one of those captive animals that raise their muzzles only to fall deep in thought because they just breathed in the scent of little kid fingers and the hunger is still inside them.

      The walls of certain nursing homes made me uneasy. I’d been to dozens of facilities, all across the city. The ones in more affluent neighborhoods were immaculate as museums. A quiet emptiness heavy with gradations of humanity. Here and there, in rooms and at the end of corridors, hung prints by Monet, Renoir, Degas. The walls were papered in smooth fabric. The seniors fit right in, like part of a window display. They dressed elegantly most of the time, in riding jackets, their pleated trousers just so. They were partial to neckerchiefs and maroon tones. Having gone through life with their heads held high, they were now learning to die the same way, manes brilliant white, ear and nose hair trimmed. Loneliness circled them like a vulture. They shrugged it off, never making excuses for their kids or showing off a single photo of a small grandchild. They adorned their golden age with Vivaldi concerts and Bach suites and yet seemed to be already dead, as if their hearts beat solely out of inertia. Most of them had aides, robust women with short hair and uniforms that hugged their bodies. The seniors leaned on them as they would on their mothers, wielding the dregs of their power: they sent the women on errands and insisted on being pushed down gravel garden paths in their wheelchairs. The women wheeled them this way and that, read them their correspondence, and rubbed oil on their diabetic feet. They tucked them in at night and parked their wheelchairs in the hallway before heading to the lobby to wait for the other women, scrubs poking out from their coats and imitation leather bags slung over their shoulders. I left with them sometimes. No matter how exhausted, they always kept talking. We rode the bus together and then each took a different metro line. The farther we got from the care home, the denser the neighbourhoods. Far away from us, Degas’s ballerinas hung on the walls, silent witnesses to the moment when life plunged into death.

      Fertile window day one, midnight. There wasn’t room in the flat for anyone else, but the doorbell kept ringing. I stopped opening. Earlier that morning I’d been to the hardware store for a latch, which meant I could now lock my bedroom door from the inside. I’d masturbated with a dildo every day for the past week. Whenever I stop

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1