Irene Solà writes and the clouds speak


"We reached with the full bellies. Painful The black bellies, loaded with dark and cold water and lightning and thunder, "he writes Irene Solà (Malla, 1990) at the beginning of I sing and the mountain dances, Prize Books Anagram of novel. They are the clouds, they speak. Then the witches, the death trumpets, a roe deer, a bitch … speak, but the people, people of the Camprodon valley and above, also speak to him, beyond the line of France.

A polyphonic novel, in which each chapter has a voice and there are many stories that are a story. If
The dams
, Documenta prize, it was already a discovery, Solà is now consolidating with this second novel. But as the writer studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and a Master's in Literature in London, he confesses that everything is seen from this perspective: "Writing and producing art structure the meaning of everything".

The stories of water women have always been told from the eyes of men who fall in love "

"I sing and the mountain dances is conformed from the look, the voice, the perspective and the narrative subjectivity of a whole series of characters -Explains-, that inhabit or pass through a piece of territory between Camprodon and Prats de Molló. They are the people, but they are also animals, mountains, ghosts, mythological characters, water women that inhabit this stretch of the Pyrenees. And the novel is built from two violent deaths within the same family. "

One of the interests was "to study all these voices and glances, which were useful for this research game in the language that allows literature and words, when they let you put a ruthless voice or a storm about to explode" . "The game I understand as a very serious and profound thing He warns. The idea of ​​the voices serves me to rethink the way or the place from which we are told things. "

He adds: "The stories of water women, for example, have always been told from the eyes of men who fall in love. They never have narrative subjectivity, they do not have their own voice. I With the witches going the same way: the judicial processes are written by the men who judged them under creepy tortures, and that is what has come to us".

Solà wants to contrast the voice of the victims in the voice of the executioners, but immediately clarifies that she has not invented it, that there have been people, such as Pau Castell Granados, author of a doctoral thesis on judicial processes of Witchcraft, "that study the biased way of how this information has come to us."

This is how the way to make these people talk. But How is a roe? The writer responds that, to compose this polyphonic piece, he has also read a lot about the formation of clouds and the life of roe deer.

The area where the novel is located was An important step in the path of exile when the Civil War ended, and for this Solà has been well documented in Retirement Museum, in Camprodon, with Lluís Bassaganya, who "from the age of 14 runs the mountain looking for artillery pieces with a metal detector, because those mountains are filled with bullets, grenades, weapons …, which they were leaving the Republicans along the way. exile ".

To finish harmonizing, Solà also reviewed the stories and legends of oral transmission that flood the valley of Camprodon. Then, with the score in front, he has finished completing it with the language, giving each narrator his own voice: "They do not say the same as women hanging 300 years ago, as some voices winking in the words of the valley of Camprodon, o the man who disguises himself as a bear in Prats de Molló, that speaks Catalan of the north ".

Although the two dead are poets, Solà says that he has nothing against poetry: "Death is not an end, Hilari continues poems beyond death. The perspective game allows you to look at the world from those that are on the other side; Death is another step that is part of this mountain and everything ".

Since the war so far, Solà has woven the novel with "all the layers that make up a territory and that we do not see when we are here," he concludes.


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