One IRL book club was not enough, folks, especially when the second book club is hosted by a dear friend in collaboration with a bookstore in town and the meetings take place inside the bookstore (more pictures from the meeting here). The first book from this book club was When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà and it could easily make it in my Top Ten Reads of the year!
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| ★★★★★ |
I am not exactly sure how to talk about this gem because no matter what I say could ever do it justice. The novel follows various characters living in a village in the Pyrenees mountains from a farmer who is also a poet to the mushrooms deep in the forest, from a witch to a just born deer, and so on. I was a bit skeptical going in, but I quickly fell in love with the story and Solà's lyrical prose.
"Poetry is a game, too, after all. Poets must be playful. Poetry is a serious matter, among the most serious. More serious than death and life and everything. A profound and vital matter. And precisely for that reason we poets have to know how to play and we have to know how to laugh and we have to know irony."
Nature Tells Its Story
Irene Solà is first and foremost a poet and you can feel it in the way she plays with words and how she structures the chapters in this book, in how each individual narrator has their own voice and even though it takes you a while to figure out who is telling the story, you know it's not someone you heard before. Her prose is especially alive when the narrator is not human, when it's the clouds, or the mushrooms, or the dog, or even the mountain. The voices jump from devilish playfulness to cheerful naiveté and it's a formidable spectacle to watch.
"I should have died then so I wouldn’t have to face it again. Then I wouldn’t have learned fear. Because there are things you don’t ever want to learn, that you shouldn’t even learn, and you end up learning them forever. And you can’t do anything, you can’t want anything, you can’t feel anything, not with all that fear. You can’t go back to being who you once were, before you learned fear. Once fear gets you, that’s it, it’s over."
A Story about Pain and Strength
I was most impressed with how in such short chapters the author manages to build complex characters that have a life of their own outside their own chapters and you might spot them from time to time. This is a story about life, especially about how fluid and unpredictable life is. There is a lot of death in this novel but there's also birth. It's a journey and the novel emphasizes how profoundly interconnected things are, between humans and with nature.
"Infinity isn't on Earth and it isn't in heaven. The infinite dwells in each of us. Like a window on the top of our heads that we didn't even know was there, and the poet's voice opens up little by little, and up there, through that crack, is the infinite."
A Circular Puzzle
The book builds itself as a puzzle where you start each chapter not even knowing who is telling the story slowly you get hints about who or what is the narrator and things start to make sense again. I recommend reading this novel in as few settings as possible, as close to each other as possible, or else you might get lost in the structure of the novel. You need to surrender to the magic of the story and then you will connect the dots.
It's a tender novel that will certainly surprise you.
"After reciting my verses, I always pause for a small moment. After the words have echoed, after my voice has touched everything, and filled the spaces between all things, I am silent. To separate the poem from the rest. And I listen. The poet speaks. The poet proclaims. But the poet also listens. A bird or two. The air that once again stakes its claim as lord and master of the space between the leaves. The thin whistle the world makes, at the bottom of every ear …"