This narrative, in which Catalan writer and poet Eva Baltasar, who has become one of the most talked about writers of her country in recent years with her first novel Permafrost, brings together rebellion and elegance, is a sensitive and passionate questioning of existence under the mysterious layer of ice.
Here I am before you, a stranger known to everyone; The woman who looks fake under the short and dense layer of grass. My outer shell is solid, waterproof like a boat’s, but it is not fake: beneath the solid ice there is a dormant, albeit habitable world.
Permafrost, which refers to the layer of soil that is always frozen, is also a layer that metaphorically surrounds the woman who is the narrator of this novel. This hero, who cannot fit in anywhere and takes refuge in sexuality, literature and art in the face of his personal crises, tries to soothe the traumas caused by the women in his family with the women he loves. His experiences in Barcelona, Brussels and Scotland during his childhood and adulthood, his efforts to break the rules imposed by his family and society, his doubts in life, and the expectations created by a controlling mother and an overly normal sister strengthen the layer he has built around himself like a shield day by day.
This narrative, in which Catalan writer and poet Eva Baltasar, who has become one of the most talked about writers of her country in recent years with her first novel, Permafrost, brings together rebellion and elegance, is a sensitive and passionate questioning of existence under the mysterious layer of ice.
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TITLE
Book Name: Permafrost
Author: Eva Baltasar
Translator: Emrah İmre
Publisher: Can Publications
Series: Contemporary
Genre: Novel
Number of Pages: 128
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EVA BALTASAR was born in 1978. Catalan poet and writer. He studied pedagogy at the University of Barcelona. He wrote many poetry books. He has won numerous awards, including the 2008 Miquel de Palol, the 2010 Benet Ribas and the 2015 Gabriel Ferrater. Baltasar’s debut novel, Permafrost, won the 2018 Premi Llibreter Prize from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for Best Foreign Book at the 2020 Médicis Prize. Translated into many languages, Eva Baltasar focuses on the body and addresses various forms of unlimited sexuality and motherhood.
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EMRAH İMRE was born in Istanbul in 1980. He studied Linguistics and Comparative Literature at the University of Auckland. He made translations from Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and Catalan. Emrah İmre, who worked as an editor at Can Publications for more than twelve years, included José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Luisa Valenzuela, Jorge Luis Borges, José Mauro de Vasconcelos, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Virginia Woolf, Luis Sepúlveda, Tina Vallès, He translated the works of authors such as Fernando Pessoa, Samanta Schweblin, and César Aira into Turkish.
