At the start of Mammoth, the third novel in the Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s ‘triptych’, the unnamed narrator organises a party in order to trick a man (any man) into having sex with her. She wants to be pregnant, ‘to gestate, to have life course through my body, to create’. The narrator is a lesbian who works for a university sociology department in Barcelona, interviewing the residents of nursing homes. The longer she stays in her apartment, the less well she feels she knows her flatmates. Eventually, she moves to a small town, where she occasionally works in a bar. Still, the desire for pregnancy lurks. 

A Baltasar lesbian tends to be fed up. In Permafrost, the first work in the triptych, the narrator’s anger is aimed at her sister; in Boulder, it’s directed at her lover. In Mammoth, the protagonist’s dissatisfaction is more generalised. She struggles to live a quiet and fulfilling life. Even after leaving the city, she is disturbed by tourists and the neighbouring shepherd feeding her lamb. On the first page, the protagonist says, ‘I masturbated in the sun while longing for a child.’ She also longs for solitude, love, freedom, crushing responsibility. In other words, she wants it all.

Baltasar’s writing is generally direct and perfunctory, though it sometimes slows for reflections: ‘I make conversation; in it, restraint occupies the space usually reserved for joy.’ The narrator’s repeated insistence on her own self-reliance can be grating, creating a distance between her and the reader, a gap she doesn’t seem