Eva Baltasar receives visitors in her home in Cardedeu, a quiet town on the edge of the Barcelona metropolitan area where city noise slowly dissolves into forest. The writer, born in Barcelona in 1978, has become one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Catalan literature, particularly since the unexpected success of Permafrost, a novel that placed her in the center of literary attention and is now adapted for the stage in Barcelona. In a conversation originally published by El País, she speaks with deliberate slowness, revising her thoughts as she goes, as if language itself were something constantly under negotiation.
Her new novel, Peces, published in Catalan by Club Editor and in Spanish by Random House, returns to the terrain that has defined much of her work: emotional intensity pushed to the edge of discomfort. The book narrates a relationship between a writer and a fish seller, a dynamic that quickly transforms into obsession, dependence and psychological erosion. It is presented, at least on the surface, as a love story. But Baltasar rejects that framing without hesitation. For her, love is not what holds the narrative together, but what collapses inside it.
The author insists that love, in its ideal form, must be healthy, balanced and constructive. What she depicts in Peces, she says, belongs to another category entirely: relationships that only later, from a distance, can be named as toxic. She acknowledges having lived through similar experiences herself, describing them as “monstrous loves” that left a lasting imprint. Yet she refuses to reduce them to mere trauma. Instead, she reinterprets them as formative experiences, almost pedagogical in nature, where emotional damage and learning are inseparable. The phrase she repeats, half ironic and half resigned, is that her “great teachers” have been those relationships that broke her.
This idea of emotional destruction as education runs through the interview, conducted by El País, and through her literary universe. Baltasar speaks of former partners not as figures of regret but as catalysts of transformation. Some of them, she suggests, acted as enemies, others as intense loves, but all of them contributed to shaping her understanding of attachment and dependency. The tone is not accusatory. Instead, it is reflective, almost analytical, as if she were observing her own emotional history from a distance that only writing makes possible.
In Peces, that reflection takes narrative form through a protagonist who becomes gradually absorbed by a violent and magnetic relationship with another woman. The story does not idealize romantic intensity. On the contrary, it shows how desire can become a mechanism of erasure, where one person slowly disappears inside the orbit of another. Baltasar describes this dynamic as a form of poisoning, an emotional contamination that spreads until the subject decides to break away in order to preserve a sense of self.
Writing, in this context, appears as both testimony and distortion. Baltasar does not believe literature heals, at least not in a direct sense. What it does, she suggests, is transform memory into something else entirely. Once written, experience stops belonging to the past in its original form. It becomes text, and therefore something reorganized, rewritten, and inevitably altered. In her view, writing can cancel memory, not by erasing it but by replacing it with another structure of meaning.
The tension between reality and fiction is central to how she is perceived as an author. Readers frequently identify her with her narrators, a confusion she treats with a mixture of amusement and distance. As she notes in El País, she often uses her characters as mirrors or distortions of herself, but never as direct autobiographical representations. At literary events, she says, readers tend to psychoanalyze both her protagonists and herself, as if the boundary between author and voice were irrelevant. She resists this simplification, arguing that literature does not function as a transparent window into identity.
Solitude is another recurring theme in her work and in her life. Unlike the conventional association between loneliness and suffering, Baltasar describes solitude as a space of comfort and even origin. It is where she writes, and therefore where she feels most at ease. Her childhood, marked by strict parental control and limited social interaction, shaped this relationship with isolation. Books became her primary companions, filling a domestic environment where reading was constant and almost compulsive.
She recalls a childhood surrounded by literature, from Agatha Christie to Latin American writers such as García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, books that arrived through her mother’s subscription to a literary club. This early immersion in reading, she suggests, was not simply formative but foundational. It provided the structure through which she later learned to write, initially by copying entire texts by hand, a practice she still defends as a legitimate form of apprenticeship.
Baltasar also speaks openly about her education in a religious school, an experience she describes not as repressive but as aesthetically and intellectually rich. The rituals, language and symbolism of Catholic tradition left a lasting imprint on her literary style. She does not define herself as religious in a conventional sense, but she acknowledges a sensitivity to spirituality, understood as a connection to something larger than the individual. This sensibility, she suggests, is embedded in her prose, which often carries a dense, almost liturgical rhythm.
Her relationship with fame is more ambivalent. Success came relatively late, after years of writing poetry with little public recognition. When Permafrost was published, it unexpectedly expanded her readership and transformed her professional life. Travel, interviews and public appearances became part of her routine, forcing her to adapt to a level of social exposure she had previously avoided. She describes this transition as learning a new language, one that does not come naturally but can be acquired with effort.
Despite this visibility, she maintains a strong attachment to solitude and to a simpler way of living. She expresses nostalgia for periods spent outside urban environments, closer to nature and physical self-sufficiency. Cities, by contrast, represent acceleration, consumption and a form of social fragmentation that she finds unsettling, even in small gestures such as the disappearance of greetings between strangers.
As El País notes in its portrait of the author, Baltasar’s work occupies a space where intimacy becomes both subject and method. Her novels do not offer stable answers about love, identity or happiness. Instead, they explore emotional instability as a form of knowledge. In Peces, as in her previous works, relationships are not sites of resolution but of exposure, where desire reveals its capacity to harm as much as to connect.
In the end, Baltasar returns to a simple but revealing idea: writing does not save, but it transforms. It does not heal wounds, but it changes their form. And in that transformation, she suggests, lies its only possible truth.
