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. Un pequeño pueblo en el corazón del Pirineo, con sus gentes y con la intensidad propia de quien vive fundido con la naturaleza. Una montaña que observa impasible la vida y la muerte de quienes la habitan. La voz de los abuelos, los padres, los hijos, los animales, los fantasmas, el bosque, las nubes.. Muchas voces que narran parte, porque todos forman esta historia, todos están relacionados, todos atrapados en el ciclo de nacimiento-vida-muerte de una forma bella, mágica y trágica al mismo tiempo. ¿Y no es acaso eso la vida? 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

By Fiona Mozley

When I Sing, Mountains Dance may leave you baffled at first. So, again, approach it not as a novel but as a celebration of language and inventiveness. It’s not quite poetry, not quite narrative, but rather a mélange of the two; a distinctive set of voices and narratives that somehow merges into a whole. And as in all good but challenging literature, meaning eventually arises like the mist lifting on a fresh, dewy morn to reveal a hidden landscape of preternatural, previously unknown beauty. 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: 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.

Blanca, your mother, wanted company. Before. And she went to find a man. And she found one. She found a strong man who worked in the fields… And they loved each other in the evenings, Blanca and your father, under the trees and upon the grass. 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.Esta lectura ha sido una de las experiencias más bonitas, emocionantes y sorprendentes que leído. Puede que últimamente tenga el corazoncito más sensible y no sea objetiva pero lo que me ha transmitido 'Canto yo y la montaña baila' ha sido precioso. The wilderness in the context of the historical North American great outdoors has mostly been explained by white masculine voices and commonly focuses on macho white characters. As a consequence, the collective imaginary associated with this time and place often disregards and erases other points of view in this fabricated white-centric US west. In How Much of These Hills is Gold Zhang tells a story of endurance and survival during the California gold rush from the point of view of Lucy, a young girl of Chinese descent. Lucy’s lyrical and immersive voice invites the reader to reflect on whose stories have been told from this period and setting and whose have been neglected. And then report water out in colossal drops like coins onto the earth and the grass and the stones, and the mighty Given I’m serving time ‘healing’ a soleus calf muscle….on walking-punishment-time-out…I can sit around all day and read my little heart out…. In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, translated from the French by Sophie R. Lewis, NY: New York Review of Books, 2021.

I’ve come away feeling a little more loved —with less need to be so critical of the world we live in…. 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.So it plays out, this ancient ancestral rite, to celebrate the time of the bear, when the land was shared out between bears and wolves and people, each trepidatious on the other’s patch. The bear in this drama grabs a man’s body, ‘drinks his fear’, grabs a woman, ‘drinks in her panic.’ The bears, we are told, will reconquer the village just as one day they will reconquer the mountain, when the time comes. All of this enacted by the villagers, roaring drunk, their bodies smeared in soot and oil. Central to the cosmology of Siberian hunting peoples such as the Even, and to hunter-gatherers in general, is a belief in the interconnectedness of relations between humans, animals and the landscape they share. (It should be pointed out that Martin’s book was titled Croire aux fauves — ‘To believe in wild beasts’ — in the original French, which gives a far better idea of what it is about than the rather anodyne or ambivalent In the Eye of the Wild.) Martin studied under the French anthropologist Philippe Descola, and her chosen area of study, like her mentor’s, is animism, which presupposes that all material phenomena have agency, and that there exists no categorical distinction between the invisible (including the so-called ‘spiritual’) and the material world, any more than there is between the world of humans, animals, and their shared environment. In an influential essay, the British anthropologist Tim Ingold, one of the foremost authorities on animism, has suggested that among hunters and gatherers there is little or no conceptual distance between ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’. ‘And indeed’, he goes on to say, ‘we find nothing corresponding to the Western concept of nature in hunter-gatherer representations, for they see no essential difference between the ways one relates to human and to non-human constituents of the environment.’ Needless to say, such a concept plays havoc with the established dichotomy between ‘humanity’, on the one hand, and ‘nature’ on the other. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ suggests that we do not consider ourselves, as humans, to be fully a part of it; and this disengagement lies at the very root of our current ecological crisis. 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. ha….for my benefit too …..I’d like to re- read these again in six months and see what I think then. The woman turns her head and doesn’t answer me. Her companion, who’s somewhat less of a witch, says, “Hilari from Matavaques is dead. He was killed by the Giants’ son, in the forest. They were hunting and they had an accident and Hilari is dead,” she says. “Hilari of Matavaques is dead. Like his father. Only twenty years old. So tragic.”

Homesteads dot a mountain high in the Pyrenees, climbing up to a village whose residents have weathered wars and tragedies, knit together by the myths and memories of their shared pasts. Among the village’s generations of healers, poets, butchers, and giants, there dwell spirits and sprites who interact with the populace. In one age, lightning strikes a moody farmer, whose foraged goods then feed the ghosts of women accused of witchcraft; the farmer’s wife, once a city dweller, has to reconstruct her future in the wake of her loss. The space opened by her mourning is filled by the witches’ musings, which themselves give way to the memories of the woodland fauna, and of the mountain itself; later, the farmer’s children encounter new challenges as they traipse into the modern age. The writing is gorgeous….tender, dense, lyrical, poetic, and violent…..with an assortment of styles…a medley of sorts.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.) 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. Moving to impossible wildernesses, here is an architectural one. Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi summons a world of endless interior halls filled with sculptures, with an open sky and tidal floods. As with The Vorrh, a prolonged stay in the halls seems to have a crippling psychological effect on humans. As Piranesi, its ever-cheerful main character, writes: “May your Paths be safe, your Floors unbroken and may the House fill your eyes with Beauty”. It's kind of a weirdly-constructed story. It's linear with each chapter told from a different perspective. That's not weird, that's pretty common. What's weird is it's kind of like a documentary of a small area in the Pyrenees and those "interviewed" include a thunderstorm, some ghosts, mushrooms, several people who live in the area, and a deer, among others. 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”.