Permafrost

Synopsis of Permafrost

Permafrost is Eva Baltasar’s surprising debut; a powerful, intimate, and raw story of a protagonist with suicidal impulses who shields herself from the outside world, but passionately gives herself to sex with other women, literature, and art. Permafrost is that layer of the earth that is permanently frozen, and it is also the membrane that covers the protagonist in this novel. Written in first person, it introduces us to a woman at the beginning of her life who protects herself from the outside world, one who never moves past the surface with anything around her, and who tries to flee from an environment that has nothing to do with the way she perceives life. A movement between self-satisfaction, bodily pleasures, and death is constant in this novel, as well as the riveting tone by a protagonist who wins the reader over with her intelligence and dark humor from the very first page. This text, full of poetic, forceful, and very physical imagery, talks about the body, sex, and the self; it is a sharp and direct work that reclaims female freedom when it comes to pleasure and solitude. With Permafrost, Eva Baltasar begins a trilogy of female protagonists that explores different stages of women’s lives.