Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s first three novels, having first made a name for herself as a poet, have been advertised as a triptych: each one seeing different (nameless) women narrate their lives in all their beauty, drudgery, absurdity and so forth. Mammoth is the final part, and it further accentuates the curiosity that Boulder, published in 2022, induced in me in the wake of 2021 debut Permafrost. Specifically, it doesn’t feel like Baltasar has created three distinct characters, but rather a single uproarious and incorrigible one whose inner existence this author was born to transmit.

You might also wonder to what extent Mammoth’s premise is autofictional, with Baltasar having moved from her native Barcelona to (it says here) “a Catalonian village near the mountains”. Her protagonist does much the same, apparently reeling from a mid-twenties crisis and a failed attempt to get pregnant, though the farmhouse she finds is not in a village but the only dwelling for miles around apart from that of a cantankerous shepherd of pensionable age.

The shepherd lives spartanly, with minimal recourse to modern technology, and so does the narrator. She never quite goes native, in that many rural customs remain elusive or baffling to her, but game attempts to assimilate are made. Baltasar, and her regular English-language translator Julia Sanches, are terrific in this department: no stranger to capturing grime, viscera and bodily displeasure, reading Mammoth you’ll catch every barnyard whiff and gasp as if you were in the middle of a winter cold snap. The last few pages of this short novel has an intriguing inconclusiveness, albeit one told with the language of finality, and triptych or not I would happily accept some more Eva Baltasar fiction in this vein.