this was okay, but read a little distant and i didn't feel connected to the characters or what happens to them most of the time.. i can see other reader enjoying this a lot tho!

— thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the free digital ARC.

Beautiful and unusual. I adored it but now I want to read it again to really see how each element fits together. I loved that elements of nature got their own chapters as well as people!

The strange title of this book belies what’s inside. Everything on the mountain gets to tell their tale, be it people, ghosts, wolves or mushrooms.
And as most pieces of writing set in Catalonia do, we touch in the Spanish civil war. The book is wonderfully translated, and feels very organically so, it didn’t feel like it had been translated at all. I felt the authors original intent had not been lost in the process.

"Folk should have more time to get to know each other before they marry. More time to live before making children".

A really beautiful collection of short stories translated from the original Catalan. Simple but thought-provoking.

Thank you Netgalley for the Arc.

What a beautiful, unusual book! It follows the lives of a family living in the Pyrenees mountains and looks at how nature, people, myth, history and the environment connect. It’s all about love and wildness. The chapters are told by different narrators - people, dogs, mushrooms, ghosts, witches and lightning! Yes, everything has a voice.
It draws you in wonderfully - you just have to engage. The prose is poetic, lyrical with marvellous descriptions and a dose of magical realism.
Stunning, haunting and timeless.
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. All views are my own.

The beautifully titled When I Sing, Mountains Dance - which has proved incredibly popular in its original publication in Catalan - is a magical, mystical and quirky collection of connected stories making up a novel. There are chapters narrated by clouds and mushrooms, witches and dogs, and it's clear the book is deeply rooted in its setting. Some lovely writing in places, but this wasn't enough to save what proved to be an impenetrable narrative for this reader.

4.5****

This book follows multiple perspectives located on a mountain in the Pyrenees. It mainly focuses on the Matavaques family and the tragedies that fall to them; the reaction of these. It looks at the interconnected-ness of life on this mountain between nature and the people.

The writing in this was lyrical. I loved how the different points of view were not just human- but the views of the wild mushrooms and lightning, which added a really interesting perspective to this book. This also had some parts of witchcraft and mythologies which I was not expecting (but certainly enjoyed!!).

This also had stunning prose and was steeped in magical realism. This had a great atmosphere from the descriptions of nature too.

Thank you to NetGalley for this E-Arc.

This was a fabulous novel wrote beautiful and elegant. I enjoyed it very much..told in multiple POV's. I highly recommend this book to everyone

🏔 Catalan Pyrenees
🏔 Multi-perspective narrative
🏔 history & folklore
🏔 women’s plight

Clouds:
❛We arrived with full bellies. Painfully full. Black bellies, burdened with cold, dark water, lightning bolts, and thunderclaps.❜

A Poet:
I sing to the moon when it blooms full,
Round fang in the kindly night,
Expecting cat.
…
When I sing, mountains dance.

This is a truly multi-perspective novel about life in the Catalan Pyrenees. Each short chapter gives voice to a different narrator, not just human inhabitants of the mountains but also animals, vegetation and nature.

Clouds roll in. Chanterelles sing in unison. Tectonic plates draw out a slow crunch. A roe deer recounts his narrow escapes. A dog observes her human’s passionate affair. Women wrestle with the challenges of wifehood, widowhood, motherhood and madness.

Together, these vignettes bear witness to the beauty and brutality of mountain life, sometimes touching on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War. It is also a rich mosaic of popular beliefs, with tales about water sprites, giants, ghosts, seers, witches and cults. There is a loose plot line centred around Sió, a women in her prime when husband was struck by lightning, and her daughter Mia, who also had to cope with bereavement and forgiveness.

I am in awe of this beautifully written book. The translated prose is at once lyrical and propulsive. It is a feast of beautiful sentences. I wanted to highlight everything.

My understanding of certain cultural and historical elements was a bit fuzzy though. For example, I was lost when Republicans and Nationalists were mentioned in passing. I also couldn’t fully understand what ‘water sprites’ were in this cultural context. I think providing a few translator’s notes would have really helped. Other than that, this book was absolute perfection for me.

Wow! Stunning read.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me access an advance copy of this book in exchange for my feedback.

This review is based on an E-ARC provided by Granta and NetGalley.

What a ride!
From the very first sentence of this book, I knew it was something special, something unique.
You’re put right into a unknown world, and if you want to enjoy this book you have to accept all of the unknown, and it’s a little disorienting at first.

This story center around Mia and Hilari, and when their father Domence is suddenly struck by lightning and dies, they grow up largely abandoned in the Pyrenees mountains surrounded by nature and ghosts of the civil war.
But when Hilari also dies Mia has to face all the joys and trials of life on her own.
This story is told over several years and follows this family through all their hardships, from a myriad of different, and surprising, perspectives and voices.

I’ve gone through so many emotions reading this, I’ve been shocked by some of its content, amazed by the lyrical prose, confused by it’s changing voices and perspectives and absolutely smitten by the sheer creativity of this work❤️

It’s simultaneously an homage to nature and the natural world and a reminder of how ruthless it can be.
This story is told through so many different perspectives, ranging from humans to mushrooms, clouds and roe-deer.
And the part written from the perspective of a deer really made an impact on me, without revealing to much it was about how they perceive humans and it was honestly both horrifying and very sad.

Reading this book was like looking at a painting that has a deep emotional impact on you, you know what you see and what you feel, but it can be very hard to describe that deeply internal experience to other people.
So read this book! You might love it, you might hate it, but I can almost guarantee that this won’t leave you indifferent.

I could easily see this book being one of the nominees for this year’s international Booker Prize!

This is something special. A polyphonic novel set high up in the Pyrenees on the Spanish-French border. The mountains are in fact the real protagonist of this novel and it really made me want to go out and enjoy nature, fresh air, clean streams, bumblebees, deer or funghi.

Each chapter is told by a different first person narrator. The structure reminded me of Niccolò Ammaniti, but the style is more lyrical and reminded me more of Jesus Carrasco. The narrators can be inhabitants of the village, but also a storm, a bear, a water spirit. Every chapter one has to reorientate and it is always a bit of a puzzle to figure out who is talking and in what timeframe we find ourselves. Ancient Pyrenean legends are intertwined with a main storyline about three generations of the families inhabiting the slopes and suffering various tragedies. In a surprisingly small number of pages it manages very successfully to instill a strong sense of history and everything that lives in the mountains.

Originally published in Catalan in 2019 it was translated into Spanish and the English translation will come out in March. The Catalan and Spanish editions by Anagrama have the beautiful Age of Mammals mural in the Yale Peabody museum on the cover and it fits very well. I had started reading it in Spanish last year but the language is too poetic for a non-native speaker to fully enjoy. I thought the translation does a very good job, and it won't have been straightforward.

4,5 stars and not 5 because I missed a bit of tension (but that is personal taste). I am very excited to continue following Irene Solà in the future, because it is one of those authors where you can be sure that more interesting work will follow.

This is a mythical and haunting tale, that uses folklore and the natural world to build something beautiful and unsettling.

Deceptively short, this book is a breathless ride through a small group of characters whose identities feel both tied to and separate from the land, and it was a strangely affecting book that I devoured in one long commute.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.