Irene Solàs “I gave you eyes, and you looked into the darkness” | EUROtoday

Irene Solà’s novel “When I Sing, the Mountains Dance,” revealed in 2022, has been translated into many languages ​​and has introduced Catalan literature appreciable success. In the spirit of the Anthropocene, the writer created a world during which animals, mushrooms and mountains seem as narrators. Your new novel additionally presents a extremely uncommon narrative association and a magical exaggeration of actuality, which on the similar time sees itself as a criticism of the rationalistic self-image of modernity.

Seven generations of girls, all descendants of matriarch Joana, together with these not alive, are gathered on the semi-ruined nation property of Mas Clavell, positioned in a sparsely populated space of ​​the Guilleries, a mountain vary in Catalonia. Here they look forward to the dying of the traditional Bernadeta and have fun a banquet, a witches’ sabbath. There are: Margarida, Blanca, Àngela, Dolça, Marta, Alexandra – the lives and sufferings of all these ladies are advised. The male characters – wolf hunters and bandits, monks and fascists – typically disappear from the world of girls, they’re relegated to the margins of the novel.

The occasions recounted take centuries under consideration: from early trendy witchcraft to episodes from the civil battle to the development of the Pantà de Sau reservoir after the Second World War. However, it’s centered on a single day by day routine: Greetings from Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (a quote from which serves because the motto of one of many chapters). This modernist fundamental construction of the novel is contrasted with components from fairy tales, Old Testament rhetoric, demonology and folkloric traditions – an afternote by the writer gives detailed details about her analysis within the bibliography on Catalan folks tradition.

At the start of this considerably completely different household story there’s an unique sin (García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was additionally a mannequin right here) when, a very long time in the past, Joana, whose requests for a husband weren’t heard by God, offered her soul to the satan (within the type of a black bull) with a view to get a “whole man”, which she then acquired within the type of Bernardí Clavell, the inheritor to the nation property. However, she complained that he was lacking a toe – bitten off by a wolf, which even devoured Bernardí’s siblings utterly. This releases Joana from the pact, however all the couple’s kids now bear the hint of the satan’s curse, with every one lacking some a part of their physique.

The novel switches all of a sudden between private views and temporal ranges. If the extent of the current is perceived from the angle of the useless, then we perceive that the “mirror” full of tiny folks is a cellphone, and the “glass urn” rotating inside is a microwave.

The tough, grotesque physicality that characterizes the e-book is paying homage to Rabelais and Bosch. It is filled with animal comparisons: Joana seems “like a toothless mare,” her husband “like a boar.” But the homestead additionally takes on an animal-creature kind: “The entrance to the house was damp and gloomy like a maw. With rough walls that were the flesh on the insides of the cheeks. With a beamed ceiling like a furrowed palate and a stone floor like a tongue worn down by many years of gluttony.”

In this novel, Solà has as soon as once more created his very personal literary cosmos that throws the conventions of ordinary realism to the wind and thus creates quick circuits between regional folklore and narrative modernity. The textual content is usually fairly unwieldy, and the constant description of virtually all of the characters as ugly could also be impressed by a Catalan legend, however the language turns into worn out within the obsessive repetition – as does the considerably schematic emphasis on the animalistic, which doesn’t permit the characters to develop.

Solà is clearly not involved with plot dramaturgy or psychological character drawing. Instead, her novel is an try to make traditions of oral folks tradition fruitful for a proper experiment and on the similar time to counter the misogynistic motivation of the historic witch hunts with a distinct narrative, with the position of girls as moms specifically coming into focus. The playful, artfully condensed novel undoubtedly requires very concentrated studying. You will likely be rewarded by experiencing a robust literary creativeness and a story voice that jumps backwards and forwards between the characters and thus creates the impression of a (feminine) collective.

The language of the novel additionally crosses borders: on the one hand it makes use of the shortest, typically even verbless sentences, alternatively there are pictorial-surreal turns of phrase in addition to borrowings from all kinds of linguistic registers and tones, from the sound of fairy tales to swearing, to lists and recipes, with generally archaic vocabulary or strongly rhythmic phrases. Petra Zickmann has additionally recreated all of this in German with confidence and sensuality. The e-book was nominated within the translation class for this yr’s Leipzig Book Fair Prize.

Irene Solà: “I gave you eyes, and you looked into the darkness”. Novel. Translated from Catalan by Petra Zickmann. Verlag S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2025. 255 pages, hardcover, €24.