When I Sing, Mountains Dance

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A little of this goes a long way, and then I wished the narrative would just get to the point. This is partly an issue of personal taste, but also a problem because the whole novel, which is meant to be polyphonic, is written in the same style and so different speakers don’t always have differentiated voices.

They leave me standing in front of the bakery. There’s no note on the door. No obituary. Nothing. It’s a quarter after eleven. The butcher’s shop and the bakery are the only two stores in town. You can buy most anything at the butcher’s, milk and juice and even pasta and rice and wine. In the bakery there’s even more, it even has dish soap and scrubbers and mops. So….it’s been a good time to switch from daytime Audiobook-walking listening hours to more daytime blanket snuggling reading. It's kind of a weirdly-constructed story. It's linear with each chapter told from a different perspective. That's not weird, that's pretty common. What's weird is it's kind of like a documentary of a small area in the Pyrenees and those "interviewed" include a thunderstorm, some ghosts, mushrooms, several people who live in the area, and a deer, among others. The writing is gorgeous….tender, dense, lyrical, poetic, and violent…..with an assortment of styles…a medley of sorts. There's no plot, the reader just follows along as some element from the last chapter becomes the focal point of the following chapter and through this string of connected slice-of-life moments, one learns about the entire region from people in town and the water nymphs in the mountains and the ghosts who wander. There's a whole gamut of emotions in each chapter and a wide range of personalities but it all comes together to create a kind of whimsical but somehow meaningful experience.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance

Given I’m serving time ‘healing’ a soleus calf muscle….on walking-punishment-time-out…I can sit around all day and read my little heart out…. Un pequeño pueblo en el corazón del Pirineo, con sus gentes y con la intensidad propia de quien vive fundido con la natur La centralidad está en la familia que integran Domenéc y Sió, y sus dos hijos, Mía e Hilari; aunque tal vez debiera decir que la centralidad está en la montaña misma, y en la naturaleza que la habita, y que junto a la magia que perdura en estos sitios donde la mano humana aún no ha dejado huella, determinan la ventura y desventura de las personas que la pueblan.

Esta lectura ha sido una de las experiencias más bonitas, emocionantes y sorprendentes que leído. Puede que últimamente tenga el corazoncito más sensible y no sea objetiva pero lo que me ha transmitido 'Canto yo y la montaña baila' ha sido precioso. La lectura es algo muy personal; hay libros que pasan sin pena ni gloria y otros sin embargo cautivan de una manera inesperada, y no sabes explicar por qué. Este, es uno de ellos. « ... a veces la belleza deja sin aire», no hay frase mejor para describir mi experiencia con este libro. El verdadero protagonista, pese a la multitud de narradores, sigue siendo el paisaje. La montaña, con su fauna y su flora. La propia naturaleza. El resto, es un mero instrumento para Irene. Herramientas que sirven para reflejar la ruralidad de un pueblecito de montaña como Camprodon y evocar todas esas vidas que algunos no sentimos tan lejanas. Quizá no similares, porque están inspiradas y ancladas en la región Pirenaica, pero si cercanas en sentimiento. El escenario sobre el que contar leyendas y tradiciones, historias de espíritus y de brujas. Pero también de personas. De muertes trágicas y familias destrozadas. De amores y desamores. De triunfos y derrotas. De oportunidades y condenas. Un relato que refleja eso de que el tiempo pasa, pero a veces no olvida. It begins with the thunderstorm, gleeful to be controlling the actions of all life below as it comes barreling through the region. While it's doing its stormy thing, one of its lightnings is attracted by a shiny knife and strikes a man right through his head while trying to get to the metal blade. He dies. Four dead witches watch and take the chanterelles he'd been collecting while out on a poetry walk (he was a poet who recited all his poems to open spaces, never writing them down) but had dropped when he died.

About Graywolf Press

The wilderness in the context of the historical North American great outdoors has mostly been explained by white masculine voices and commonly focuses on macho white characters. As a consequence, the collective imaginary associated with this time and place often disregards and erases other points of view in this fabricated white-centric US west. In How Much of These Hills is Gold Zhang tells a story of endurance and survival during the California gold rush from the point of view of Lucy, a young girl of Chinese descent. Lucy’s lyrical and immersive voice invites the reader to reflect on whose stories have been told from this period and setting and whose have been neglected. 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, and it has a different value. 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 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. Originally published in Catalan in 2019 it was translated into Spanish and the English translation will come out in March. The Catalan and Spanish editions by Anagrama have the beautiful Age of Mammals mural in the Yale Peabody museum on the cover and it fits very well. I had started reading it in Spanish last year but the language is too poetic for a non-native speaker to fully enjoy. I thought the translation does a very good job, and it won't have been straightforward.

Central to the cosmology of Siberian hunting peoples such as the Even, and to hunter-gatherers in general, is a belief in the interconnectedness of relations between humans, animals and the landscape they share. (It should be pointed out that Martin’s book was titled Croire aux fauves — ‘To believe in wild beasts’ — in the original French, which gives a far better idea of what it is about than the rather anodyne or ambivalent In the Eye of the Wild.) Martin studied under the French anthropologist Philippe Descola, and her chosen area of study, like her mentor’s, is animism, which presupposes that all material phenomena have agency, and that there exists no categorical distinction between the invisible (including the so-called ‘spiritual’) and the material world, any more than there is between the world of humans, animals, and their shared environment. In an influential essay, the British anthropologist Tim Ingold, one of the foremost authorities on animism, has suggested that among hunters and gatherers there is little or no conceptual distance between ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’. ‘And indeed’, he goes on to say, ‘we find nothing corresponding to the Western concept of nature in hunter-gatherer representations, for they see no essential difference between the ways one relates to human and to non-human constituents of the environment.’ Needless to say, such a concept plays havoc with the established dichotomy between ‘humanity’, on the one hand, and ‘nature’ on the other. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ suggests that we do not consider ourselves, as humans, to be fully a part of it; and this disengagement lies at the very root of our current ecological crisis. As Nastassja Martin, she is interrogated by a Russian FSB (secret services) agent, on the basis that she has spent most of her time in a militarised zone occupied only by Even hunters, who live in a state of almost complete self-sufficiency. She spends three hours with the agent, who is the first, but not the last person to intimate that to be an anthropologist is to be a spy. Her two families turn up; Nastassja’s birth family from France, and Nastinka’s adopted Even family from the forests of Kamchatka. The two groups of her loved ones look nothing like one another, speak different languages, and come from different worlds; the two worlds between which she is riven. One of the nurses looking after her tells her: ‘Nastya, you might almost say there are two different women occupying this room.’ An astute observation, but perhaps more accurately there are three of her, if you include the bear. I’ve come away feeling a little more loved —with less need to be so critical of the world we live in….

By R.L. Maizes

The novel’s poetics are of a primordial sort, encompassing both geographical upheavals and the detritus left behind by outside conflicts. A girl struggles with her uncommon coming of age, pulling dead grenades from the river and pretending that the couple she spies on is magical; disaster befalls friends out on a hunt. Visitors arrive, romanticizing the locals; the locals resist their clumsy inveigling, knowing that visitors fade. This is the route of the retreat into exile. Where the Republicans fled. Civilians and soldiers. Toward France. It’s a damp morning. I inhale, bringing all that clean, wet, pure mountain air deep into my lungs. That aroma of earth and tree and morning. It’s no surprise the people up here are better, more authentic, more human, breathing this air every day. And drinking the water from this river. And looking out every day at the majesty of these legendary mountains, so beautiful it pains the soul. Blanca, your mother, wanted company. Before. And she went to find a man. And she found one. She found a strong man who worked in the fields… And they loved each other in the evenings, Blanca and your father, under the trees and upon the grass. It all centers around Domènec, the lightning-strike victim who is the catalyst for everything that follows. He’s not really the protagonist, though. In fact, you could postulate that the book is an assemblage of various heroes, each earning the mantle of protagonist on their own.

Towards the end of When I Sing, we are swept up in the ineluctable sadness of all that cannot be undone and of an accompanying sense of release, as Mia asserts that being sorry for something and forgiving somebody might happen at the same time, might be two sides of the same coin, and one’s sorrow might co-exist with one’s love, however far that sorrow or that love has had to travel. And then report water out in colossal drops like coins onto the earth and the grass and the stones, and the mighty Un pequeño pueblo en el corazón del Pirineo, con sus gentes y con la intensidad propia de quien vive fundido con la naturaleza. Una montaña que observa impasible la vida y la muerte de quienes la habitan. La voz de los abuelos, los padres, los hijos, los animales, los fantasmas, el bosque, las nubes.. Muchas voces que narran parte, porque todos forman esta historia, todos están relacionados, todos atrapados en el ciclo de nacimiento-vida-muerte de una forma bella, mágica y trágica al mismo tiempo. ¿Y no es acaso eso la vida? So it plays out, this ancient ancestral rite, to celebrate the time of the bear, when the land was shared out between bears and wolves and people, each trepidatious on the other’s patch. The bear in this drama grabs a man’s body, ‘drinks his fear’, grabs a woman, ‘drinks in her panic.’ The bears, we are told, will reconquer the village just as one day they will reconquer the mountain, when the time comes. All of this enacted by the villagers, roaring drunk, their bodies smeared in soot and oil. One of them turns and regards me with disdain. She looks me up and down. She holds my gaze and replies, “We are in mourning.”During her long recovery from ‘the bear’s kiss’, as she fondly calls it, she interrogates the events that will lead her towards an understanding of what has happened to her; and to this end unspools an attentive and passionate account of the people and animals amongst whom she has lived. Ultimately, too, she shares her confusion, her inability to decipher the timeless puzzle with which she is confronted. She finds herself at the very limits of interpretation. Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem, the book’s title is taken from the last line of a poem written by one of the novel’s narrators, Hilari. The line evokes an image of the poet using their voice to create movement, as illustrated in the final eight lines of his poem.