I’m starting off my Women in Translation month coverage with mini responses to two novellas: one Catalan and one French; both about disaffected women trying to work out what they want from life.
Mammoth by Eva Baltasar (2022; 2024)
[Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches]
I’d been vaguely attracted by descriptions of the Spanish poet’s novels Permafrost and Boulder, which are also about lesbians in odd situations. Mammoth is the third book in a loose trilogy. Its 24-year-old narrator is so desperate for a baby that she’s decided to have unprotected sex with men until a pregnancy results. In the meantime, her sociology project at nursing homes comes to an end and she moves from Barcelona to a remote farm where she develops subsistence skills and forms an interdependent relationship with the gruff shepherd. “I’d been living in a drowning city, and I need this – the restorative silence of a decompression chamber. … my past is meaningless, and yet here, in this place, there is someone else’s past that I can set up and live in awhile.” For me this was a peculiar combination of distinguished writing (“The city pounces on the still-pale light emerging from the deep sea and seizes it with its lucrative forceps”) but absolutely repellent story, with a protagonist whose every decision makes you want to throttle her. An extended scene of exterminating feral cats certainly didn’t help matters. I’d be wary of trying Baltasar again.
With thanks to And Other Stories for the proof copy for review.
Aimez-vous Brahms… by Françoise Sagan (1959; 1960)
[Translated from the French by Peter Wiles]
At age 39, divorced interior decorator Paule is “passionately concerned with her beauty and battling with the transition from young to youngish woman”. (Ouch. But true.) It’s an open secret that her partner Roger is always engaged in a liaison with a young woman; people pity her and scorn Roger for his infidelity. But when Paule has a dalliance with a client’s son, 25-year-old lawyer Simon, a double standard emerges: “they had never shown her the mixture of contempt and envy she was going to arouse this time.” Simon is an idealist, accusing her of “letting love go by, of neglecting your duty to be happy”, but he’s also indolent and too fond of drink. Paule wonders if she’s expected too much from an affair. “Everyone advised a change of air, and she thought sadly that all she was getting was a change of lovers: less bother, more Parisian, so common”.
I was by turns reminded of Chéri by Colette, In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor, and even The Graduate (“Mrs. Robinson,” anyone?). Simon asks the title question to invite Paule to a concert; that she has to ponder it carefully tells her she’s “losing herself, losing track of herself”. But it’s all too easy for the status quo to be reinstated after a brave act. Middle-aged woman makes bid for freedom but ultimately nothing changes: same plot as The Funeral Cryer and any number of other books, but this was so much better. How did Sagan manage such insight at age 24 (and this was her fourth book)?! While not quite as memorable as Bonjour Tristesse, this is another incisive slice of fiction that has aged well apart from using “sodomite” and “Negress” as matter-of-fact terms for bit players. I’d read anything else I can find by Sagan. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
The Sagan sounds so much more appealing than the first novella! I have a hard time with characters who continually make the worst choices. (Unless it’s a thriller and then I can be more forgiving because they’re more unrealistic anyway.) Give me some growth or learning in a character, just a smidge!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sagan’s books are really stylish, you can imagine them as 1960s movies.
I used to be okay with ‘disaster woman’ novels but I think I’m done with them now.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Sagan sounds worth trying though as I’m yet to read Bonjour Tristesse, I should probably start there. The Bathasar is definitely not for me!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Bonjour Tristesse is fantastic!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Rebecca
we read everything of Sagan’s writing as well because Kb is a fan and collector of Sagan’s books. By the way that’s a nice old Penguin-edition of ‘Aimez-vous Brahms’. Is it the first English edition?
In her novels Sagan expresses the Zeitgeist very well and she was a political influencer too.
Isn’t it fun to read old books again. We agree her work aged well.
Thanks for sharing
The Fab Four of Cley
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
My copy is from 1962, so not a first edition. (It cost me just 33 pence at a charity shop!) I’ll look forward to finding more of her work.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh noooo, huge shame about the Baltasar. I rather liked Boulder, although little of it has stuck with me. I’m also unlikely to feel sympathy for a protagonist in their early 20s (?! Surely not a very common age at which to get broody?) going about having a baby in this particular way, though…
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yeah, I remember you and Laura liking that one, and it being on the International Booker list. In some ways it sounds quite similar, but also more promising. Being desperate for a baby at 24 was just one of the peculiar things about Mammoth!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yeah, the “lucrative forceps” metaphor that you excerpted also had me stumped…
LikeLiked by 2 people
Ha ha, I actually quite like that bizarre metaphor, it’s nice to have a jolt every once in a while.
LikeLike
Hmmm, you see, I wonder if this would actually make me warm to her more as it’s SO counter cultural. Very young women are told as insistently that they must *not* have babies as women in their thirties are told that they must. But I’m also a bit wary of Baltasar. I also liked Boulder but was disappointed by Permafrost. Her writing tends to be really weird (as in your forceps quote, which is too convoluted a metaphor for me) or powerfully direct. I probably will read this one for completion’s sake.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s a good point about the counter-culturality. I hadn’t thought about that! If you do read this one, it’ll be interesting to see how it compares to her other two English translations.
LikeLiked by 2 people
You would be most welcome to my proof copy!
LikeLiked by 1 person
That would be great, thank you!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I find it hard to enthuse about Blatasar. But to my shame I have never read any Sagan. Isn’t that dreadful? THIS MUST CHANGE!
LikeLiked by 1 person
The two by Sagan that I’ve read so far were both under 130 pages: short, sharp reads, and definitely recommended.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I really like Aimez-vous Brahms, both the book and the film (even as a teenager) – it made me cry buckets and would probably have even more of an impact on me at this age. Shame about the Baltasar though – I haven’t read her yet but had high hopes…
LikeLiked by 1 person
I didn’t know there was a film; I bet that would be great.
I’ve heard better things about the previous Baltasar novels, especially Boulder.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The film stars Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Perkins, so it’s really worth seeing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh I really wanted to read Boulder (lost in the fire!) but this does give me pause! I also like “lucrative forceps”, is that a weird translation I wonder?
I read Bonjour Tristesse for an early Novellas in November and loved it, why haven’t I read any more? This sounds very good, maybe a little like that Annie Ernaux one about an affair with a young man (which I tried to read in French, and realized I was way out of my depth)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve read a few by Ernaux but I don’t know that one. She has a matter-of-fact style I don’t always love.
Bonjour Tristesse is an ideal NovNov read!
LikeLike
That’s the other Sagan I’ve read; like Laura F, I’m wondering why I’ve not read more of her stuff!
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] first two reads for Women in Translation month were Catalan and French novellas. With this third one I’m tying in […]
LikeLike
[…] […]
LikeLike
[…] worst books I read this year: Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs […]
LikeLike
[…] little blip in her early adulthood. I found this a disappointment compared to Bonjour Tristesse and Aimez-Vous Brahms – it really is just the story of an affair; nothing more – but Sagan is always highly readable. […]
LikeLike