Niadela
Beatriz Montañez

NON-FICTION | 2021 | 344 pages

Let’s say you have been working in television for years, presenting a show during prime time. You have it all: fame, money, professional recognition, a rich social life….but you feel something breaking. And you leave it all behind—but for real. Because you know that you’re carrying a deep and ancient wound that neither fame nor money nor prizes have been able to heal. And it’s time to take care of that wound.

This is the story of Beatriz Montañez. She decided to live in a stone cabin, an ancient peasant home that had been abandoned for several decades. There was no electricity, no hot water, and no other humans for at least 25 kilometers in any direction. It was perfect, because it was time to commit, to deal with that hollow and empty woman by herself. An extreme confinement? An experiment? An outburst? Not by a long shot. Beatriz Montañez has been living in her modest refuge for over five years…simply dedicated to writing.

The story she tells us in Niadela is, ultimately, one of dispossession: the abandonment of herself in order to find who she is in reality. But how to embark on this stationary trip? Like it has been done for millennia: by stoping movement, separating from your group or your tribe, sharpening your perspective and ear in order to understand what nature wants to tell you. In this way, Niadela turns into an exceptional exercise of attention, observation, and listening. In other words, pure nature writing where, with patience, precision, and an extraordinary poetic breath, the author narrates the constant evolution—one that is as ephemeral as it is wonderful—of the life blossoming around her.

Beatriz Montañez’s writing seems to be guided both by her scientific curiosity (that the reader is enriched by) and by a higher intuition where nature is created and comes undone between the words, and where at times animals and plants become one—as do the mineral and the atmospheric, and the narrator with the things she perceives. In a disconcertingly natural way, the text talks to us about an everything, one that only poetic language can uncover and that, when it settles in our consciences, allows for the progressive healing of the wounds that memory drags around.

A static journey that becomes an exceptional exercise in observation and listens to what nature has to tell us.

RIGHTS: spanish ERRATA NATURAE

BY BEATRIZ MONTAÑEZ:

Niadela
NON-FICTION, 2021