Boulder

Poet and novelist Baltasar (Permafrost) returns with a sinewy if somewhat predictable story about a tempestuous relationship between two women. The freewheeling narrator is working as a cook on a passenger freighter when, upon docking in a Chilean town, she meets and falls for a Scandinavian geologist named Samsa, who nicknames her "Boulder," after those "large, solitary rocks" of unknown provenance. Theirs is an affair of stolen moments until Samsa accepts a job in Reykjavik. Despite Boulder's hesitance to settle down--"The short term can tether you to the world of senses," she narrates--she accompanies her new love to Iceland. Years pass in relative harmony, with Boulder owning and operating a food truck, but nearing 40, Samsa wants to have a baby. This decision divides the couple, and for Boulder, Samsa's eventual pregnancy elicits a mix of jealousy, reverence, and revulsion. Baltasar offers a great deal of insight into the effect of the pregnancy and the child's birth on the characters, though the plot turns on tropes. Frustrated by their sexlessness, for instance--which Boulder compares to a "dockyard gridlocked by a single ship"--she cheats with a younger woman. Still, this slim, visceral novel power gains power from its subversive blurring of maternal intuition and its queering of parenthood. (Aug.)

An inveterate loner gives up her cherished solitude for the lure of love but finds that "the strength of family ties" may bind too tightly. When we first meet the narrator of this tightly controlled meditation on sensuality, passion, and duty, she is squatting alone in the rain waiting for the freighter that will take her away from her temporary job as a mess-hall cook at an isolated camp on the Chilean coast and into an uncertain future. Taciturn, self-reliant, and stubborn, our narrator has come to the tip of the world in search of "true zero," a place where she can stop "pretend[ing] life had a structure." Though her three-month contract at the camp has ended, she refuses to return to the "devastating possibility of the same old job" and instead signs on as the freighter's cook, spending the next few years traveling up and down the South American coast. This itinerant life satisfies with its repetitive labor, its lack of expectations beyond the immediate needs of the body, the beauty of its vistas that can be appreciated from afar; but then our narrator meets Samsa, a young Icelandic woman with "white-blonde hair [and] swimmer's shoulders," in a port city cafe and falls in instant lust. Her feelings are reciprocated, and she soon becomes involved in an elliptical relationship with Samsa, who renames her Boulder after the "large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element." When Samsa accepts a position in Reykjavík, Boulder moves there with her and tries to settle into a landlocked life, rocked only by the swells of her passion for her lover. Samsa, however, wants to expand and solidify their family with a little yellow house on the outskirts of the city and a baby whose arrival will erase everything that came before but replace it with nothing as solid as "the strength of [the] family ties" that Samsa so fondly imagines for them. Boulder's emotional isolation coupled with the poetic intensity of her sexuality makes her a striking character, unique in action and in thought, and the prose lilts in truly surprising ways as it navigates the plot's more familiar tropes of love and desire, dedication and alienation. The book is a modern love story--global, queer, existential in its moral hierarchies--but it is also a rumination on those two most ancient of words: lover and mother. A novel that lionizes the desire to be alone even as it recognizes the beauty and grace found within a family. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.