"This is a dizzying, kaleidoscopic tale of rural life in the Great Pyrenees. It is told from a variegated patchwork of local perspectives. The farmer struck by lightning begins the tale, but the story quickly shifts to consider the perspective of such narrators as the lightning, a roe deer, the chanterelle mushrooms in the woods, the ghosts of witches, the mountains themselves. The result is tumultuous and seething with life."
Publisher Graywolf Press
Publication Date 2022-03-15
Section New Titles - Paperback / Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Rachel S.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781644450802
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.
When I Sing, Mountains Dance, winner of the European Union Prize, is a giddy paean to the land in all its interconnectedness, and in it Irene Sola finds a distinct voice for each extraordinary consciousness: the lightning bolts, roe-deer, mountains, the ghosts of the civil war, the widow Sió and later her grown children, Hilari and Mia, as well as Mia’s lovers with their long-buried secrets and their hidden pain.
Solà animates the polyphonic world around us, the fierce music of the seasons, as well as the stories we tell to comprehend loss and love on a personal, historical, and even geological scale. Lyrical, elemental, and mythic, hers is a fearlessly imaginative new voice that brilliantly renders both our tragedies and our triumphs.