First come the storm and the lightning that kills Domènec, the peasant poet. Then Dolceta enters the scene, telling the story of four women hanged as witches. Then there is Sio, forced to raise her children alone in the mountains of Matavaques. And then the “trumpets of the dead”, the mushrooms that with their black and succulent caps celebrate the immutability of the cycle of life.
Irene Solà has written a novel in which women and men take the floor – but also ghosts and devils, clouds and plants, dogs and eggs – who find themselves living together in the Pyrenees. A borderland where the memory of centuries of struggles for survival, persecutions driven by fanaticism, fratricidal wars hovers, and yet it embodies a beauty that needs no adjectives. Fertile ground to free the desire to tell stories. A place to imagine that death, like life, is never something definitive.
