Reading Group: When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola

Ann suggested this book alongside Lord of the Rings (we take turns to make suggestions, and always suggest two for the rest to choose from), since the blurb implies a similar kind of scenario: a group of people, in this case a family, ‘grow[ing] up wild’ on the land, in this case on the ‘hulking Pyrenees’. In fact, it turned out to be a very different kind of book altogether.

 

It does indeed begin, as the blurb tells us, with the death by lightning of a young farmer, Domenec, and we do get to learn of the fates of his family as the years go by, and it is true that the book ends with a moving reconciliation for one of the family members. But the story of the family is not foregrounded throughout the book, and the point is to illustrate that it is only one thread in an interconnected biosphere. Domenec’s death is related dispassionately, not by any conventional narrator, but by the collective voice of the clouds that bring the lightning that kill him. They note the ghosts of women once killed as witches approaching the body and then picking up the chanterelle mushrooms for which he had been foraging, and moving on. The next chapter is related by one of those ghosts, telling of how they were tortured. Each chapter is devoted to a new and different narrator, human or non-human: we hear Domenec’s widow, a roe deer, the mountains themselves telling the tale of their geological upheaval, a ghost of the Spanish Civil War, and the chanterelles with their (symbolically) interconnected mycelium – ‘the cap of one is the cap of us all … the spores of one are the spores of us all … the story of one is the story of us all’. 

 

This might all sound difficult, fragmented, and possibly pretentious, but in fact the book avoids entirely the archness to which it might have succumbed, while reading like a fluid dream. We were all captivated by the lyrical yet earthy prose, the authentic feel of every viewpoint and the author’s astounding empathy. The chapter taking the viewpoint of a dog made us laugh out loud - we agreed it was one of best and funniest things we’d ever read. It seemed to us that the translation from the Catalan, by Mara Faye Lethem, was excellent. Ann and Doug were very taken by the fairytale and folklore references threaded throughout, which add to the dream-like quality and underpin the sense of history and time. The book constitutes a moving plea for respect for the earth and its ecosystem, and we were indeed both delighted and moved.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here