I find it a lot harder to explain why I liked a book than word vomiting about why it did not work for me. It becomes worse when it’s something I wouldn’t be inclined to like but something about the particular execution worked for me. So bear with me while I betray my academic roots and partake in an exercise of praise-writing. These books deserve that.
On paper, Eva Baltasar’s Boulder (incredibly translated by Julia Sanches from the original Catalan) should not have worked for me at the time I read it. The book has no dialogue and fancies section breaks instead of paragraphs, both of which typically take me a long time to get used to, not to mention it takes something special for an author to convince me that stylistic choices like these actually add anything to the story.
But the sparseness of Baltasar’s writing lends to the authenticity of the narrative. It is very invested in the bias of it’s point of view in a way that is incredibly refreshing to read. Unreliable narratives do this a lot, and it does tend to work for me, but I think Boulder struck a chord because she really isn’t unreliable. This is her experience, her story. The truth doesn’t really matter. The lack of proper dialogue, the section breaks mimicking thoughts jumping around someone’s head, the short bursts of access you get to this person’s life, never being fully let in but understanding and relating to the emotional turmoil that Boulder is going through, it’s all incredible. I particularly thought the transition between the two major emotional states of the character (trying to avoid spoilers) was masterfully crafted, subtle and effective.
These kinds of emotional transitions are always captivating to me, especially when they’re done in a short section, a chapter of a book, a scene of a play, a sentence. One if the most effective instances of these that I have ever read was in Gross Indecency by Moises Kauffman (incredible docu-play) and I haven’t felt that kind of heartbreak and horror until I picked up Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These.
The fact that this follows a man really threw me for a second. I don’t really read a lot of male centred narratives (an unconscious and I have somehow read two this year already. Wild. When I found out what the book was about, I was doubly suspicious. Look, I’m not an expert on Irish history by any metric but the main focus of this book (at least the political focus) is something that I am vaguely familiar with. I tend not to read fiction about this kind of stuff anymore (I had my World War II era and I don’t intend to go back). Still, the book was short enough for me to read it over two train rides to work, and I’m so glad I did.
Keegan’s roots in short stories serve her well in this book. I wouldn’t even call it a novel, it’s barely a novella, clocking in at 128 pages. The writing is concise and, despite not being particularly beautiful, is loaded with emotional weight. Even before that one scene on which the story turns, you can feel the imbalance, fear and unrest. Any longer and the book would have been repetitive, would have introduced unnecessary conflicts, would have ruined the perfectly ambiguous ending which also serves to complicate the central character even further. Each of those 128 pages is expertly utilised.
Both Boulder and Small Things Like These are as successful as they are because they understand the needs of the story. I feel like this idea is used to justify a lot of longer form stuff, but I think it’s much harder to recognise this need in shorter works. It forces both the writer and the reader to really confront the characters and their emotional state. The books are sparse but forceful, and I may finally understand the hype for minimalism.