“A successful suicide, these days, is heroic.” Our Catalan narrator is a depressed, misanthropic lesbian, and she has been prompted by her creator’s therapist to “write about your life” (we are told as much in Julia Sanches’s translator’s afterword). Eva Baltasar’s narrator continues: “The world is full of unscrupulous people certified in first aid; they’re everywhere, gray and unassuming like female pigeons but aggressive like mothers”. It is perhaps the most satisfying image of this slim novel: the officiousness of pigeons; that of mothers, the gauntlet thrown: consider suicide. Unfortunately, things go largely downhill from here.

The therapy novel is difficult to pull off. It is by its very nature solipsistic, filled with tangents; unfiltered, often highly pessimistic. The great therapy novel is Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983), which is stylish, rip-roaringly funny and a masterclass in tangents, which loop back into the main narrative with panache. Permafrost (Permagel, 2018), however, is nothing but tangents leapfrogging over one other: an episodic read lacking in superstructure. The back cover promises an exploration of female desire, but the book does so with very little sophistication, instead abounding in cheap shots of what is presumably attempted shock factor (e.g. fruit dipped in vaginal mucus).

Baltasar’s narrator, while caustically funny, also slips into cruelty, and pushes the boundaries of the self-obsessed anti-heroine. When her aunt calls to tell her she can no longer live in her flat rent-free because she wants to sell it, the niece considers becoming a life model (“I could think of no other way to maintain my lifestyle”), or “throw[ing] myself off the balcony”, which smacks of self- entitlement and snottiness.

Of course, a narrator’s likeability is neither here nor there to a critic, but Baltasar seems to be less contemptuous of her character’s blithe lack of self-awareness than complicit in it; either way, the effect is akin to getting trapped at a party by a self-involved bore. At one point she imagines herself as Scarlett O’Hara, and muses, “It must be wonderful to surrender to the hands of a meaty Mammy” – and it is hard to know what’s worse: the indefinite article, the “meaty”, or the “Mammy”. It demonstrates a crassness of the imagination, a callous ignorance of the trope to which Margaret Mitchell’s character has lent her name, while simultaneously designating a perceived type: a racist trope made accessory to artless jottings. Better to save such...