Catalan author and artist Irene Solà concocts a heady mixture of folklore, poetry and humor in her European Union Prize-winning novel, When I Sing, Mountains Dance. In a vibrant evocation of the Pyrenees, the mountainous borderland between Spain and France, Solà achieves a panoramic sense of place by leaping between perspectives with a verve that lends an animating energy to every facet of the land and its creatures.
Each of the chapters in Solà's novel features a distinct narrator, only some of them human. Leading the cavalcade is a pack of storm clouds, with "black bellies, burdened with cold, dark water, lightning bolts, and thunderclaps." When Domènec, a farmer foraging for black chanterelle mushrooms, stops to rescue a calf ensnared in a jumble of wires, the clouds send a bolt crashing down on his head, killing him. This scene, with its startling blend of bucolic beauty and elemental violence, is Solà's vision of the Pyrenees in microcosm.
With Domènec's untimely death as her point of origin, Solà traces a tangled network of associations and encounters that bring the mountains and their inhabitants to life. What emerges is a sprawling, multigenerational portrait of tragedy and perseverance rendered in jubilant, adventurous prose; that so much genuine profundity is housed in a book so deceptively slim is testament to Solà's skill. Never stopping to gawk at her own sublime creations, she instead takes after the black chanterelles, to whom eternity is "a thing worn lightly. A small thing, an everyday thing." --Theo Henderson, bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle, Wash.