Most of the reviews here recently are from an international book club my American friend in Turkey invited me to at the beginning of the year. Which is to say, Jag sjunger och bergen dansar by Irene Solà was our pick for May!
Much like with En attendant la montée des eaux, the back-of-the-book summary for this one (in my opinion) mischaracterized the plot as well as the tone of the book. In this case, the blurb for Jag sjunger… suggests that the book is a kind of bildungsroman focusing on a pair of Catalonian siblings, or perhaps a family portrait. At least that’s the case with the Swedish blurb (my own rough translation):
Farmer and poet Domènec lives a rural life in the Pyrenees mountains in northern Catalonia, in the lingering shadows of a war-torn past. One day, out picking mushrooms during a thunderstorm, he is struck dead by lightning. Left behind are his wife, Sió, and their two children, Mia and Hilari. Together, they have to remember and create their lives in a mythological landscape where people, as well as nature, have something to say about the land’s unhealed wounds–but also about the possibilities of love.
When I Sing, Mountains Dance is a marvelous novel depicting, in a unique poetic style overflowing with literary delight, previously unspoken Catalonian experiences and a people subject to the whims of Mother Nature.
The book doesn’t really focus on Sió, Mia, and Hilari trying to collectively remember Domènec. Nor does it focus on how they struggle to create a life for themselves. It’s more of a portrait of an entire community and landscape anchored in a pair of tragic events. Because what’s not clear from that summary is that most of the book’s perspective characters are not, in fact, Sió, Mia, or Hilari. Not only do we get to hear from their neighbors; we get to hear from anonymous visiting tourists to their village, storm clouds, ghosts, dogs, mushrooms, even the mountains themselves. And where Solà really excels in Jag sjunger… is in crafting a genuine variety of voices, often supernatural or otherwordly. Each chapter is so self-contained that you could equally call the book a collection of short stories rather than a novel, even as the red thread of Mia and Hilari brings many of them together.
I’ve had a mixed experience with novels written by poets. Kris is a powerful work of art and I enjoyed On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, while Ixelles left a lot to be desired. I think the determining factor here is the novel’s structure: are we talking about a straightforward, traditional plot? Or something more avant garde? The common denominator in all three books I enjoyed was their episodic, decentralized structure. The timeline is often erratic, jumping across chronology, in favor of presenting specific scenes or images rather than a straightforward narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. The same holds true for Jag sjunger…: we begin with the death of Domènec and we end with Mia (perhaps?) achieving something like closure about various tragedies in her life, but in between the timescale is just all over the place. When poets aren’t afraid to lean into their strengths and experiment with a form rather than try to capitulate to established market norms, that’s when interesting art happens.
And finally, I love seeing how book covers vary internationally. The English language ones all feature a landscape, with assorted flora in the foreground and the Pyrenees in the background. The Swedish edition, on the other hand, focuses almost entirely on the mushrooms, with only a subtle framing from the contours of the Pyrenees. (It took a minute of staring to realize it was supposed to be the Pyrenees and not just a ragged piece of fabric or paper.) Tranan knows how to appeal to their target demographic.