Western literature is obsessed with the individual human. Solà smashes this. In Canto yo y la montaña baila, a human death is no more or less significant than the fall of a beech tree. When Domènec dies, the spores rejoice because his rotting body will feed the soil. This is not nihilism; it is deep ecology. Solà suggests that our grief is valid, but it is also arrogant. The mountain has seen a thousand deaths. It will see a thousand more.
Do not read this book for plot. Read it for texture.
When Canto yo y la montaña baila was published in Spain, critics compared Solà to Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead) and John Berger (Into Their Labours). The novel won the Òmnium Prize and the Anagrama Prize, cementing Irene Solà as the heir to Mercè Rodoreda, the giant of Catalan literature.
Internationally, the English translation was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Dublin Literary Award. It has become a cult classic among "nature writing" circles, though Solà rejects that label. "It is not nature writing," she has said. "It is writing from within nature." irene sola canto yo y la montana baila
The novel begins with a storm and a lightning strike that kills a young poet named Domenec — and his ghost continues to wander the mountain. From there, the narrative shifts perspectives among:
Through these voices, the novel traces generations of life, death, love, loss, and myth in the Pyrenees.
The most striking feature of Canto yo y la montaña baila is its narrative democracy. Solà abandons the traditional human-centered narrator. In this book, every physical and spiritual entity has a chapter. Western literature is obsessed with the individual human
Here is a breakdown of the "characters" who narrate:
By giving voice to the non-human, Solà achieves what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a "hyperobject" perspective. The tragedy of Sió’s death is not a tragedy for the mountain; it is just an event. The lightning does not apologize. The rain does not stop for human tears.
Irene Solà is also a visual artist (she holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona), and this is visible in every sentence. Her writing is not descriptive; it is depictive. She uses run-on sentences that mimic the breathlessness of climbing a ridge. She uses fragmentary lists that look like botanical inventories. Through these voices, the novel traces generations of
For example, instead of writing "There were many mushrooms," she writes a litany of their names: "rovellons, pissacanques, camagrocs, llengües de bou, fredolics." The reader does not need to know these species; the rhythm of the words creates the forest.
This is key for non-Catalan speakers reading the English translation (by Mara Faye Lethem). Lethem has done a heroic job preserving the "untranslatable" wildness. The English version manages to keep the syntax twisted and the imagery sharp. You feel the moisture on the page.
Remember that Solà is also a visual artist. Reading Canto yo y la montaña baila is like looking at a triptych painting. Each chapter is a different panel. The colors are specific: the orange of mushrooms, the blue of the sky before a storm, the grey of the slate roofs. She writes "ekphrastically"—describing visual scenes with the precision of a painter.
Canto yo y la montaña baila literally means "I sing and the mountain dances." It contains the novel’s entire philosophical core. The "I" is ambiguous: Is it the author? Is it Sió? Is it the reader? The act of singing (narrating, writing, living) creates a reaction in the landscape. The mountain does not just stand there; it dances. It moves, it shifts, it falls, it grows. The title is an invitation to a reciprocal relationship with nature.
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