When I Sing, Mountains Dance

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Un pequeño pueblo en el corazón del Pirineo, con sus gentes y con la intensidad propia de quien vive fundido con la natur Slowly, the story unfolds, each chapter like a small symphony. The clouds carry a storm, and within the storm a lightning bolt that strikes a man dead. The man, Domènec, has been collecting chanterelle mushrooms and attempting to rescue a calf that was tangled in wire. He leaves behind a widow, Sió, and two small children; daughter Mia, and son Hilari, the latter only two months old. After the villagers take away Domènec’s burnt body and plant a cross in the place the lightning drilled into him, the witches drop by from time to time and piss on the cross. Such is their role; to sully and enliven, to corrupt and to enhance. So….it’s been a good time to switch from daytime Audiobook-walking listening hours to more daytime blanket snuggling reading. It's a bit early to say this, but I'm gonna call this my favorite book for the year. It absolutely enchanted me. 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.

The text cited by Tim Ingold appears in the essay ‘From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations’, in Ingold’s book The Perception of the Environment, London: Routledge, 2000.)I thought the writing was lovely, sometimes archaic, sometimes very current. If I was this overwhelmed with a translation, I can't even imagine how stunning it is in Catalan which you can hear a snippet of here. Laxness’ novel focuses on Bjartur of Summerhouses, a poor Icelandic farmer of the early 20th century who maintains an isolated croft at the edge of a loosely habitable world and one which is not. The wilderness here, becomes Bjartur’s nemesis and the book focuses on what this violent struggle for survival and sanity in an inhospitable and cruel landscape can inflict on the human soul. 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. 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.” 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.

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. 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.And then report water out in colossal drops like coins onto the earth and the grass and the stones, and the mighty I’ve come away feeling a little more loved —with less need to be so critical of the world we live in…. The narrative begins with the Lightening, which is both the chapter’s title and the narrator’s name: Inventive and lyrical. . . . When I Sing, Mountains Dance is work of unexpected emotional power.” —Trisha Collopy, Ploughshares

Emotions are more naked up here too. More raw. More authentic. Life and death, life and death and instinct and violence are present in every single moment up here. The rest of us, we’ve forgotten how sublime life is. In the city we go through the motions with our watered-down lives. But here, here you really live each and every day. As soon as the weather turns, even if it’s just a gawky bit of early spring, I have this need to get up into the mountains, at least once a month. Leave it all behind and just spend a day in the fresh air. Sometimes with a friend, sometimes on my own. If I can ever buy a little house up here, an old farmhouse, a summer place, I’ll call it Can Gentil. But it would have to be a farmhouse, because I can’t see myself in a villa. Just when I was surrendering to the difficulty that this book was going to be, but still wanting to stay with it… The coiled snails shuddered in their secluded homes, godless and without a prayer, knowing that if they didn’t drown, they would emerge redeemed to breathe the dampness in. In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, translated from the French by Sophie R. Lewis, NY: New York Review of Books, 2021. Es evocador, triste, bello, muy sensitivo, con un sentimiento tan puro y vívido que ha logrado teletransportarme a esa zona de los Pirineos de los que habla: la casita de Matavaques, Mia, Jaume, Lluna, e Hilari (¡Ay! Hilari🖤) la dureza de la vida en la montaña, el paso del tiempo, las tradiciones, leyendas...

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. And when the spring breezes blow up the valley; when the spring sun shines on last year‘s withered grass on the river banks; and on the lake; and on the lake’s two white swans; and coaxes The new grass out of the spongy soil in the marshes—who could believe I’m such a day that this peaceful, grassy valley brooded over the story of our past; and over it’s spectres? People right along the river, along the banks wear side-by-side lie many paths— and fresh spring breeze blows through the valley in the sunshine. On such a day the sun is stronger than the past”. To me..this slim book is very advance ….and of course I’m not the best person for the job of reading it….but I included my struggles… remembering I one of the little peas a part of the human race and we all have struggles…(reading this book might not be yours- but we all struggles with something)….

The poetic style, unfortunately, which seems widely loved and praised, really wasn't for me. Chapter after chapter is told in short, naïve sentences, often repeating, often building upon themselves into a kind of fragmented run-on poem. It drove me a bit mad: 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. Sometimes a book comes along that enhances your way of being in the world: for two such books to fall into your hands, in serendipitous collusion, is a thing to marvel at, and perhaps even to write about. Whatever their differences, and they are legion, the two books under review, both written by young women — one a memoir by an anthropologist, the other a piece of fiction that reads like a fable — together provide a thorough dismantling of the notion of genre. But more importantly, both books open a window onto systems of belief in which humans and other animals, plants, fungi and diverse organisms survive and thrive in interconnected and interdependent ways, consciously or otherwise, reflecting an unexpected harmony at the heart of lived experience. Mercè Rodoreda’s darkest novel takes place in an unspecified time and is set in an isolated and unnamed mountainous region, where a village is surrounded by dangers; the “caramens” – creatures that no one has ever seen – or the battering of a fierce river which threatens to sweep away the houses. The townsfolk are ruled by primeval and nightmarish laws and rituals. The surroundings of this village are merciless, but such ferocity seems a trifle compared to human cruelty. 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.Estar acompañada de Bon Iver mientras leía ha sido la guinda del pastel ¿Puede haber un grupo más evocador, melancólico y bonito? Probablemente, eso es solo quedarse en la superficie. Es muy difícil hablar de esta novela, de verdad. Más aún, tratar de decir de que va. En realidad, no es más que un despliegue de elementos que construyen un escenario rural y montañoso a través de una escritura tan poética como detallista. Sin embargo, es la originalidad de los dieciocho narradores, pasando desde un rayo hasta un corzo o un oso, donde aparece la magia y crea cierta fascinación (o rechazo) por la novela. Canto yo y la montaña baila se va deshojando como una flor en monólogos internos mientras parece no contar nada, pero a la vez cuenta muchas cosas. Historias pequeñas, anécdotas, sensaciones y momentos de los habitantes (humanos o no) de un pequeño pueblo de Los Pirineos.