Institut Ramon LLull

Our nameless 24-year-old protagonist leaves the city after coming to the realization that society’s system of work is a scam, that she was handing over the most valuable things she had, her time, her body, and most of all her dignity. Initially she says she wants to be a single mother, but her encounters with men become increasingly primitive along with her environs, and her desire morphs toward the animalistic: to conceive and bear a child.

Baltasar closes her lyrical lesbian outsider trilogy with her most austere novel yet, both in terms of style and plot: the tale of a woman told in three acts; a first-person howl against greasy urban decadence; a search for restorative silence among the beasts she nurtures, sleeps with and kills; a flight from the threat of hunters; a flight from extinction.