When I Sing, Mountains Dance

January 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.

Starred review from January 15, 2022
Set in the Pyrenees, award-winning Catalan author Sol�'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 Dom�nec 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--Dom�nec'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. Sol�'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." Dom�nec'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.

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Starred review from February 1, 2022
Sol� offers a fabulous amalgam of the grief of one family and the glorious setting of a Catalan village high in the Pyrenees. A poet, fiction writer, and artist, Sol� infuses this world with personality by giving natural elements voices and emotions. The laughter and anger of the clouds and the roe deer are woven into the legends of the region, creating an imaginative context for a powerful story of life, love, and loss. The family that lives in the Matavaques house, dreamy farmer Dom�nec, his wife, then widow Si�, and their grown children Hilari and Mia, along with Mia's lovers, are well-drawn and inextricably linked. In a village where awareness of Spain's tragic civil war is constantly evoked by discoveries of grenades and bullets, and where nature shapes every experience, the intersection of life and death is ever-present. Lethem's translation preserves the linguistic artistry of the original in the way the multiple narrators' respective personalities and complex secrets emerge and in how the descriptions of place, weather, the seasons, plants, and animals are all integral to character revelation and plot development. Sol�'s immersive and memorable novel has the deceptively simple elegance and depth of a folktale.

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