When it was published in Catalan in 2019, critics hailed it as a breakthrough. The English translation by Mara Faye Lethem (published by Graywolf Press) preserved the incantatory rhythm of the original prose. Solà’s style is often compared to that of Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead) and the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, but with a distinct European mountain roughness.
One critic for The Guardian wrote: "It reads like a hallucination you don’t want to wake up from." Solà uses run-on sentences, sudden line breaks, and a total lack of quotation marks. Dialogue melts into narration. Memory melts into prophecy. irene sola canto yo y la montana baila
This is not a sad book; it is a "vibrant" book. Solà argues that grief in a rural environment is different from urban grief. In the city, death is hidden. In the Pyrenees, death is visible in the rotting log, the fox’s meal, the changing snow. The characters do not "get over" Sió’s death; they absorb it into their daily labor. When it was published in Catalan in 2019,
Ghosts, transformations, and speaking landscapes are presented without irony — not as fantasy, but as a worldview rooted in peasant cosmology. One critic for The Guardian wrote: "It reads