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Translation longlisted for the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize

To be born is to be unhappy, he said, and as long as we live we reproduce this unhappiness.
THOMAS BERNHARD, THE LOSER

Any novel that begins with an epigraph from Bernhard goes straight to the top of my to-read pile.

Permafrost is Julia Sanches’s translation of Eva Baltasar’s Catalan original Permagel, and published by the wonderful small press And Other Stories

And Other Stories publishes some of the best in contemporary writing, including many translations. We aim to push people’s reading limits and help them discover authors of adventurous and inspiring writing.

Sanches also translates from Portuguese and Spanish, such as another And Other Stories book in 2021, Slash and Burn, and provides an illuminating afterword.

As the novel’s English blurb accurately describes, Permafrost’s “no-bullshit lesbian narrator is an uninhibited lover and a wickedly funny observer of modern life.� Her story is told, over just 111 pages (a shining example to all novelists), in fragmentary non-linear vignettes.

The narrator is often acerbic and irreverent, although at times her permafrost shell cracks, often suicidal (but more in her fantasies than reality where she is foiled by do-gooders: The world is full of unscrupulous people certified in first aid), and, unlike the typical Bernhardian narrator, not at all monomaniacal, rather the opposite as her aims in life and her lovers change as frequently as the short chapters. At one point, while she is unclear how to make a living, a friend tells her:

“Why not work as an au pair for a year?� Now I remember, it was Jovana who said it, also that thing about having a “degree in sitting on a couch all day twiddling your thumbs.� “What can I say, I like reading,� I said. “So go work as an au pair. You can read all day long.� Jovana assured me that all I would have to do was take the kids to school, and some light dusting. I might even be given a small salary. Maybe, I thought. Sure, maybe.

Doubt: the rift through which the world's heat slips in, a brazen violation of the permafrost.

She goes rather randomly from her home town of Barcelona to a remote small town in Scotland (on another occasion she goes to live in Brussels simply because “a city whose symbol is a little boy pissing was a city I knew I would like�) for an au-pair role which initially, living up to Jovana’s advance billing, she enjoys so much that she fantasises about crippling one of the children to prolong the family’s need for her assistance - these thoughts are so soothing, I don’t need to act on them,

But then she becomes oppressed by the endless greenery:

This green is indulgent and verges on offensive. It visually assaults me like Matisse's red table, except without the ensuing peace and childlike calm. It annoys me to have my deep-seated love for Matisse compromised by an unsettling coat of green. Green permeates my body like a horse shot; it rises like a suffocating tide, floods every cavity, and colonizes the most fertile parts of my ego. I have the frightening urge to end this relentless unease by leaping out of the window. A lousy idea —the window isn't far enough from the ground. A death on damp garden tiles doesn't really appeal to me. I can't stomach the thought of a slug accidentally trailing its miserable life over my miserable death, or of using my dying breath to gnaw on fragments of death, or of using my dying breath to gnaw on fragments of words as leftover thoughts gush down my forehead in plain sight and my eyes take on the sympathetic look of a server at a late-night bar.

A week later, I go home.

Although home is to a spare room in the house or her avowedly heteronormative sister, one who regards coke as a drug - coca-cola that is not the Class A substance. And it’s in passages like this where the narrator’s acerbic humour comes to the fore:

‘So, what’s it like with a woman? In bed, I mean.� It’s half-past twelve and it’s taken my sister two whole servings of almond chicken and fried rice to let her hair down. Or maybe it was the Coke. She hasn’t had any in more than three years. Slow-acting poison, she calls it. But tonight is special. Not everybody has a lesbian sister to comfort them after a breakup. Tonight’s heart-to-heart will be a real treat � irresistibly modern, maybe even obscene. My sister can’t help picturing herself as the lead in a popular TV series. Playing the sister of the lesbian is quite the role; it offers a seal of respectability. ‘Do you want Nestea?� I ask her before dinner. She throws me a thunderous look, as if she’d just decided to go into business with the Mafia. ‘Screw it, I’ll have the Coke!� she says, thrilled. Screw it! ‘Careful it doesn’t go to your head. You’re not used to such strong beverages.� My sister doesn’t know her way around a can, so I transfer the Coke into a tall glass that she takes from my hands with a wanton gleam in her eye. The poor thing feels funny, she’s used to getting her beauty sleep. But great things are afoot!

And yet her permafrost cracks a little when she ends up sitting beside her sister’s first daughter night after night in hospital, while her sister nurses her new baby. But she still decides that when the girl is better she will finally go through with her plans.

At first the end of the novel, that follows immediately after, felt a bit disappointing to me - something already prefigured in the narrator’s fantasies comes to pass - although on reflection it makes for a satisfying close to this phase of the narrator's life, and also is open to interpretation as to whether this is actually just another fantasy:

Even though I’m single, even though I’m gay, even though I’m suicidal. Auntie is a responsible person now. This morning I made myself some fresh orange juice and washed it down with pills. I smile without crying. Smiling like this thaws the permafrost. The violin plays on. Families huddle like villages under siege. But the savagery that stalks and besieges us - is life.

4 stars

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