This year, the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) will be featuring two writers whose best-selling novels, one originally written in Catalan and the other in Spanish, have recently been translated into English. Freedom and Solitude: Eva Baltasar & Fernanda Trías can be enjoyed online on October 22nd at 4pm. As a way of introducing Canadian readers and giving them a taste of the newly-translated books by these two very talented writers, Lattin Magazine and I joined forces to explore more of the interests and concerns of both Catalonian poet-turned-novelist Eva Baltasar, and the Uruguayan novelist and short-story writer Fernanda Trías.
My two-part interview begins here with Eva Baltasar, author of ten volumes of poetry that were published to great acclaim. As a poet, she has been the recipient of prestigious literary awards, such as the 2008 Miquel de Palol, the 2010 Benet Ribas, and the 2015 Gabriel Ferrater. Permafrost, is her first novel – part one of a triptych in which she adopts the first person to explore the universes of three different women. The book received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for France’s 2020 Prix Médicis for Best Foreign Book. Now available in English in an excellent translation by Eva Sanches (published in London and New York by And Other Stories Press) Permafrost has sold its translation rights into eleven languages while remaining firmly on the Spanish best-seller lists. Yet despite her huge success and fame, Eva prefers to lead a quiet life. Together with her wife and two daughters, she lives in a small village near the mountains.
Even though we only met online, the moment I made eye-contact with Eva Baltasar I felt as if I already knew her. Having just read Permafrost I was biased in her favour: her protagonist is funny, smart, and engaging – much as Eva’s broad smile and easy-going personality make her immediately likeable. For this written record of the interview, I have translated her answers to my questions into English.
Eva, your protagonist has an incredible sense of humour. She says “Medication, medication, and medication. A successful suicide, these days, is heroic.” At the same time, however, she also says that “maybe resistance is the only way to live intensely.” And, in fact, your character does live intensely. She has a very active sex life, and she takes on with responsibility and dedication all the family responsibilities that life throws in her lap (although she doesn’t behave in the same way when it comes to love and commitment). How do you explain this contradiction? On the one hand, there is this constant flirtation with the idea of suicide and, on the other, this vitality, this holding on to life tooth and nail. Is this what “living on the edge” means?
I see my protagonist as a woman who travels along the edges. She is a bit of an outsider, of a peripheral character. She is surrounded by other characters (her mother, her sister…) who take anxiolytics and antidepressants in order to cope with life, to be happy, or to just go on. And even though similar drugs have been prescribed for her, she refuses to ingest them because she wants to keep a lucid outlook on reality. This lucidity is what places her at the edge, the place where she lives the most intensely because she is fully conscious of every moment, every situation she encounters. This makes her suffer, of course — that’s why she has suicidal ideations, which in the novel have an aesthetic quality. This, too, is what pushes her to enjoy life’s pleasures in full awareness, because in Permafrost there is a lot of enjoyment and diverse pleasures: sex, reading, art, philosophy. The protagonist decides she will live intensely, accepting all the consequences, good and bad, of such a radical decision.
The title Permafrost refers to a protective layer that the protagonist builds to shield herself from the suffering of the world (and the suffering that her loved ones cause her). But there are comments, moments that fracture that crust of hers. Fear and doubt, as she herself says, are capable of breaking her. “Fear, domineering mother. Turns out it’s practically impossible to wean off her tit.” Fear and doubt get to her through her mother’s words. How is motherhood experienced in Permafrost? Because there has been a lot of talk lately about mothering and the relationships between mothers and daughters, and the one between your characters is fascinating. What role do fear and doubt play, not only in the lives of your characters but, in your opinion, in today’s life in general?
In Permafrost I addressed different ways of mothering. The most evident is perhaps the mother of the protagonist, a way of mothering that nowadays we’d call “toxic, ”although I think toxicity is an innate part of both motherhood and fatherhood in the sense that we cannot avoid transferring our own beliefs, fears, angers, frustrations, etc, to our children. Doing so is inevitable, no matter how aware of it we try to be as we exercise our maternity. Having said that, the protagonist’s mother is a very controlling woman —she’s castrating, victimizing and ready to assign blame or instill guilt. She’s very violent in this way with her two daughters, who have chosen quite different paths. The protagonist’s sister has jumped on the wagon of a “healthy life” and has had two daugthers because that’s what she was supposed to do, what was expected of her. In spite of that, she takes medication because it’s the only way for her to cope. She has focused on fulfilling the expectations that both her family and society had of her, and this has turned her into a pariah in her own life. On the other hand, the protagonist has made a conscious decision not to have children and must deal with the weight of the others’ judgment because of that. Feeling unable to take responsibility for anyone’s happiness or unhappiness, she justifies this incapacity as a kind of freedom, which in turn pulls her away from the authenticity of relationships in general.
Fear is something that we carry within us from before we are born: it is part of our shadow and it is often strengthened by our own mothers.
Fear is something that we carry within us from before we are born: it is part of our shadow and it is often strengthened by our own mothers. I would say that doubt is born from the conscious self and I think that it is a good tool to deal with fear. Doubt is an opening towards something new, towards other ways of living, of loving, of being in the world, based on self-recognition and internal coherence.
In that same vein, I adore the sentence that says “some individuals can only grow as amputations.” Do you think that society places such a huge importance on the notion of familynot so much as a way of providing safety and protection but of clipping women’s wings? Can it be, then, that only by “amputating” ourselves from family, or from the role that family imposes on us, can we reach those things we call freedom and happiness, or plenitude?
I’d say that family, just like society, can be castrating for both men and women. I don’t believe that amputating oneself from family is necessary in all cases in order to reach those things we call freedom, happiness, or plenitude. We must learn, be aware of who we are and how we want to live our lives, and then do exactly that. In doing so, in living coherently that way, family falls back into place, each member occupying their own place, a place that we can like or dislike but that should never limit us. It is not easy to reach that level of understanding if we have spent our entire lives held captive inside our family’s cage. Permafrost’s protagonist is very aware of this when she says that during childhood, normalcy is restricted only to family. That is the normalcy that shapes you. A child’s brain is a songe and as malleable as clay, and this means that the family environment has a huge power: the power to mold the person. Even so, I don’t think that this power will leave such a big stamp that it cannot be changed. It is never a decree or a verdict.
Your protagonist runs away from all romantic commitments. She states “the legalization of gay marriage was a big win, don’t get me wrong, but I’d been getting on just fine without it. Like coral snakes, not all marriages are poisonous – though it’s best to keep your distance, just in case. For the sake of precision, a non-poisonous coral snake is called a false coral, which says it all.” No matter how much she complains, however, she is deeply committed to her family. How can you explain this other contradiction? On the one hand, running away from commitment and, on the other, embracing it to the fullest, the way she does with her niece (no further details here, as I don’t want to spoil anything for the readers of Permafrost).
The protagonist of Permafrost doesn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s happiness or unhappiness, and that leads her to reject commitment (to lovers, to possible friends or to children). What Permafrost and the other novels of this triptych have in common is that their protagonists suffer from a deep lack of communication. Family is suffered in silence and lying is a means of survival. There is no real commitment until the end. The character of the niece is an inverted mirror. What we have there is a black sheep recognizing hertself in another and feeling an urge to save her, not from her own wool, but from the inclemency of a very dark night.
Your protagonist “unlearns” a lot from her niece and the challenges she faces. What do you think that we as readers of Permafrost (and as members of society) should unlearn in order to better cope with the tests and trials that life throws our way?
We could learn that life is not a challenge. We could unlearn the fighting and rehearse surrendering —but not conformity. And from there, live, which means to act, to expand, to create. And in respect to family, there’s something very important: in family relationships, particulary in regards to children, there is no ownership. This is a very liberating thought.
If you had to summarize your novel in a single sentence, what would you say?
I would extract a quote from Chapter 3: “The power of fear is in the sum of every small dream reduced to dust.” And I’d add that the novel is about a violent attempt at running away from that.
What does it mean for you to see Permafrost translated into English? What would you like to say to Canadian readers about your book?
I’m very excited that a publishing house from another country is interested in bringing my story into its own language and I love that a translator like Julia Sanches has been able to bring it not only into another language, in this case English, but into another culture. I’d like to extend the same gratitude I feel towards them, to Canadian readers. I hope they find in Permafrost a voice that puts into words the discomforts and hardships that we can feel and suffer simply because we live in similar societies.
I’d like to extend the same gratitude I feel towards them, to Canadian readers. I hope they find in Permafrost a voice that puts into words the discomforts and hardships that we can feel and suffer simply because we live in similar societies.
Is there a Canadian writer that you particularly admire? [Besides Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, who are the best known ones.]
Besides considering her a wonderful writer and profoundly enjoying reading her work, I am fond of Alice Munro because we are both authors at Club Editor, my mother publishing house. But I have also read Irving Layton. His poetry excites me, it shakes me, it gives me life.
What word of advice could you give to other writers whose careers may be just beginning and who dream of achieving success?
I wouldn’t know what to say to a fledgling writer who wrote seeking success because, in my opinion, having the passion and calling to write is in itself a form of success. I’d suggest never pursuing success for its own sake, but simply to love the act of creation through writing. That has to come above all else if we feel that this is what we must do. I believe firmly that when you do what you have come to do in this world, success arrives on its own and manifests itself in many different ways.
What does it mean to you to be a Catalonian writer who is recognized and celebrated internationally?
It makes me feel grateful to be alive. And it makes me feel connected, in a very special way, to every single person whose work has allowed me to focus on writing — and this is an endless list of editors, copyeditors, translators, typesetters, booksellers, readers, commercials, distributors, printers, librarians, journalists, etc. I write from and about solitude, and the impossibility of ever being truly alone in the world never ceases to amaze me. I’m grateful for it.
Baltasar, Eva. Permafrost. Translated by Julia Sanches. London: And Other Stories, 2021.
