Book Review: "When I Sing, Mountains Dance" by Irene Solà

Now, as I have said, I am starting my list of authors and books I have never heard of again. I deleted everything from the list and I'm remaking it slowly, more or less about three books in advance to when I read them. This book entitled When I Sing, Mountains Dance, has both good points and bad points. The good points revolve around its experimental storytelling techniques and poetic writing style which is both beautiful and descriptive. The bad points revolve around the fact that I simply do not care about the main story enough and would like to know more about the other side-stories that feature within. The book was too short and terse with its chapters, it offered me very little to get lost in.

Of course, I will start with the advantages of the text (and there are quite a few). I did like it in many ways:

First of all, the writing was very unique. A blend between a sort of nature-based mysticism and the romantic atmospheres associated with Catalonia, you could drift away into the tragedies as they came along. This also meant that the reader's emotional state would be highly changed by these alterations of narratives, side stories and interpersonal quests of nature's 'way' and 'method'. How everything falls together is proved to be a race, running and running until death strikes.

This brings me on to the theme of running. There is a lot of running that happens in this book. In my favourite part of the text which is narrated by a deer, there is something almost sad about running. I will not say exactly what happens, but the book deals with universal loss in an entirely new way that I do not think I have ever seen done before in all my time of reading. Running may lead to loss, but the impacts and bruises s are felt long afterwards. It is a stylistic treat to the reader to see this happen in many different ways during the narratives.

Again, this brings me on to the word 'narratives'. This text is made from narrators that include the family of the man who dies, the deer, another person climbing the Pyrenees and even the mountains themselves. These are all written with their own personal tone, voice and styles. Each of them are completely individual and I love the way the narratives weave into each other like one big painting. You really feel like you can smell the air of bread as a character walks up the mountains to see the shops are closed, you can feel the forest the deer is running through and the tragedy of the passage of lightning when it jolts through a father's human body.

Throw them all away, all the things you’ve ever desired, toss them into the road, into some ditch, the things you used to think. The things you loved. And look how paltry, how measly they were. That man and that mountain. They make a woman want a small life. A runty life like a pretty little pebble. A life that can fit in your pocket. Like a ring, or a hazelnut. They don’t tell a woman she can choose things that aren’t small.

Here is something I did not enjoy about the book that lost it two marks and, you might think it trivial but for me it's pretty bad: I wish the book was longer and explored these side stories more. I wish there were longer chapters with more writing about the deer, about the man climbing the mountain, the wife's stream-of-consciousness and so much more. I felt like everything I was reading was somewhat unfinished like a beautiful painting without a gilded frame. It felt almost underdone. Every time I was trying to fall in love with it, I was thrown back out and had to trade in for another narrator to follow.

All in all, I thought the book was well made though, it was short and terse and I felt a little underwhelmed by the end. I guess I should not set my standards too high but it is a really horrid feeling when you get lost in a book only for it to end. Think about that and then think of it on a scale per chapter. Every time I got lost I was found by some other narrator and pulled somewhere else. Sometimes I like being lost.