When I Sing, Mountains Dance: A Novel

by Irene Solà

Overview

A spellbinding novel that places one family’s tragedies against the uncontainable life force of the land itself.

Near a village high in the Pyrenees, Domènec wanders across a ridge, fancying himself more a poet than a farmer, to “reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain.” He gathers black chanterelles and attends to a troubled cow. And then storm clouds swell, full of electrifying power. Reckless, gleeful, they release their bolts of lightning, one of which strikes Domènec. He dies. The ghosts of seventeenth-century witches gather around him, taking up the chanterelles he’d harvested before going on their merry ways. So begins this novel that is as much about the mountains and the mushrooms as it is about the human dramas that unfold in their midst.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450802
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	94,433
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

Editorial Reviews

01/17/2022

Solà’s vivid and magical tale, winner of the European Union Prize, brings to life a small Pyrenees village. The story begins when a farmer is killed by a lightning strike during a storm, leaving his wife, Sió, a widowed mother to a daughter, Mia, and a two-month-old son, Hilari. When Mia grows up, she falls in love with Jaume, the son of “Giants,” who are stigmatized for their size as well as lack of education and rough manner. After Jaume accidentally kills Hilari in a hunting accident, he’s jailed while he awaits his trial for murder, and Mia is left alone to live her life in the mountains with her dog. Woven throughout are the voices of a roe deer, witches, a bear (“tremble in fear, men who killed us”), and Mia’s dog. The mountains are heard from as well, alongside geological sketches, creating a multilayered and lush array of perspectives (“My slumber is so deep that it slips beneath the seas,” says a mountain). In language at turns poetic and stark, Solà offers a fresh and mythic work that fully reckons with the beauty and savagery of a landscape. It’s a fine achievement. Agent: Paula Canal, Indent Literary. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Solà's kaleidoscopic technique vividly evokes a landscape dense with violence and beauty. . . . The overlapping, multifaceted points of view serve to deepen and enrich the human struggles, which, far from being muted, are rendered instead more urgent, more moving by being inextricably linked to the region's natural history and its past. A masterfully written, brilliantly conceived book that combines depth and breadth superbly.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"In language at turns poetic and stark, Solà offers a fresh and mythic work that fully reckons with the beauty and savagery of a landscape. It's a fine achievement."—Publishers Weekly

“Solà's immersive and memorable novel has the deceptively simple elegance and depth of a folktale.”—Shoba Viswanathan, Booklist

“A heady mixture of folklore, poetry and humor. . . . Solà achieves a panoramic sense of place. . . . What emerges is a sprawling, multigenerational portrait of tragedy and perseverance rendered in jubilant, adventurous prose; that so much genuine profundity is housed in a book so deceptively slim is testament to Solà's skill.”—Theo Henderson, Shelf Awareness, starred review

"In the age of the Anthropocene, Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance is a salve. . . . In a magically rendered translation from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem, Solà’s second novel offers up healing for those who care to find it. With this imaginative triumph, Solà has created an enduring work that captures something of the quotidian expansiveness of time, nature, and life itself."—Maura Krause, Zyzzyva

“Just as James Joyce shocked the world out of narrative complacency and Gertrude Stein awakened the slumbering poetsphere into modernism, Solà takes the novel and breaks it into fragments before reassembling it, piece by piece, into stories that express joy, pain, and sorrow and that echo back to each other."—Mike Maggio, Washington Independent Review of Books

With its crisp prose, compassionate eye, and emotional precision, Solà’s novel pays tribute to the interconnectedness of the natural world. When I Sing, Mountains Dance illustrates that when we step back to see those connections, our own lives take on greater meaning.”—Morgan Graham, Chicago Review of Books

“Inventive and lyrical. . . . When I Sing, Mountains Dance is work of unexpected emotional power.”—Trisha Collopy, Ploughshares

“Like nothing I've read before. This novel is a feral, yowling love howl to a place of such staggering majesty that it resists usual comprehension. By giving voice to animals, storms, outcasts, one-legged girls, birthing women, and the mountain itself, Solà pushes past the limits of human experience to tell a story of instinct and earth-time that is irresistible in its jagged glory.”—C Pam Zhang

“This book made me swoon. Translated with great musicality, tenderness, and wit, When I Sing, Mountains Dance is thirst-quenching literature of the best kind, rich and ranging, shimmering with human and non-human life, the living and the dead, in our time and deep time. Here is a Pyrenees fable that is utterly universal, deadly funny, and profoundly moving.”—Max Porter

“There’s so much beauty in this wonderful polyphonic novel that each page makes you fall in love again with nature, with imagination, with words, with life. When I Sing, Mountains Dance is timeless and unique.”—Mariana Enriquez

From the Publisher

★ 2021-12-24
Set in the Pyrenees, award-winning Catalan author Solà's second novel draws on history, myth, geology, and folklore while telling the story of a family struck by tragedy but persevering.

The book begins with storm clouds massing above the mountains: "We came from the sea," the clouds announce, "and from other mountains, and from unthinkable places, and we’d seen unthinkable things." A poet farmer named Domènec rescues a trapped calf during the ensuing storm and is struck by lightning. His death is observed by the clouds and by the ghosts of four women accused centuries before of witchcraft. The Pyrenees of this novel are rich with ghosts and stories, with the natural world as well as the human, and the chapters are narrated from many points of view—Domènec's widow; black chanterelle mushrooms; a roebuck fawn; a water sprite; the earth itself ("And our peaks will become valleys and plains, and our ruins, our remains, will become tons of rubble sinking into the sea, new mountains"). The ghosts observe the living, form their own attachments, write poetry, go swimming. Solà's kaleidoscopic technique vividly evokes a landscape dense with violence and beauty, where village children bring home grenades scattered decades before by retreating Republican soldiers, the local festival celebrates the emergence of bears from hibernation, and second sight is matter-of-factly accepted. "Up here even time has a different feel. It’s like the hours don’t have the same weight. Like the days aren’t the same length, don’t have the same color, or the same flavor. Time here is made of different stuff." Domènec's offspring grow up. A second tragedy befalls the family and is absorbed by the survivors. The overlapping, multifaceted points of view serve to deepen and enrich the human struggles, which, far from being muted, are rendered instead more urgent, more moving by being inextricably linked to the region's natural history and its past.

A masterfully written, brilliantly conceived book that combines depth and breadth superbly.

Kirkus Reviews