Maria Gabriela Llansol, Geography of Rebels Trilogy, Trans. by Audrey Young, Deep Vellum, 2017.
Geography of Rebels presents the English debut of three linked novellas (The Book of Communities, The Remaining Life, and In the House of July & August)from influential Portuguese writer Maria Gabriela Llansol. With echoes of Clarice Lispector, Llansol’s novellas evoke her vision of writing as life, conjuring historical figures and weaving together history, poetry, and philosophy in a transcendent journey through one of Portugal’s greatest creative minds.
“If anyone might be profitably compared to Clarice Lispector, it might well be Maria Gabriela Llansol. This is because of the fundamentally mystical impulse that animates them both, their conception of writing as a sacred act, a prayer: their idea that it was through writing that a person can reach ‘the core of being.’” — Benjamin Moser
“Llansol’s text . . . creates spaces where conjecture and counterfactual accounts operate freely granting a glimpse of an alternative reality.” — Claire Williams
Poetic and hermetic, unlike anything else you’re going to read for the remainder of the year, Audrey Young’s forthcoming translation of Maria Gabriela Llansol’s trilogy is a true gift to the English-speaking connoisseurs of meditative erudite prose. The three texts combined under the title Geography of Rebels (Geografia de Rebeldes) are hard to pigeonhole: it is quite possible that the writer, little known outside her native Portugal, invented her own genre which I will abstain from labelling but rather encourage my readers to experience for themselves when the book is brought out this December by the adventurous Texas publisher Deep Vellum. The magnificent heterotopia, constructed by the Portugese author out of the debris of European history and culture, brings together Thomas Müntzer, the leader of the ill-fated peasant uprising during the early Reformation, St. John of the Cross, the Spanish Catholic mystic and poet whose masterpiece Dark Night of the Soul (La noche oscura del alma) narrates the peregrination of the soul on its way to the unity with God, and Friedrich Nietzsche, a rebel philosopher par excellence. The real protagonist of this tripartite extravaganza, however, is the sensual and cerebral Ana de Peñalosa, the major driving force of the community of rebels. She is also a mystic, as well as an intellectual whose goal is to recreate some kind of transcendental space exclusively devoted to knowledge. Known today as just a marginal figure to whom St. John of the Cross dedicated the four stanzas of The Living Flame Of Love (Llama de amor viva), Ana de Peñalosa takes centre stage in Geography of Rebels to tell her story and the story of a Europe torn between the Reformation and Counter-reformation in a unique and utterly absorbing manner, weaving a complex tapestry of allegories, symbols, allusions and revelations, which is likely to invite just as many interpretations and learned discussions as the poetic heritage of her more renowned admirer. - theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/forthcoming-geography-of-rebels-trilogy-by-maria-gabriela-llansol/
“If anyone might be profitably compared to Clarice Lispector, it might well be Maria Gabriela Llansol. This is because of the fundamentally mystical impulse that animates them both, their conception of writing as a sacred act, a prayer: their idea that it was through writing that a person can reach ‘the core of being.’” — Benjamin Moser
“Llansol’s text . . . creates spaces where conjecture and counterfactual accounts operate freely granting a glimpse of an alternative reality.” — Claire Williams
Poetic and hermetic, unlike anything else you’re going to read for the remainder of the year, Audrey Young’s forthcoming translation of Maria Gabriela Llansol’s trilogy is a true gift to the English-speaking connoisseurs of meditative erudite prose. The three texts combined under the title Geography of Rebels (Geografia de Rebeldes) are hard to pigeonhole: it is quite possible that the writer, little known outside her native Portugal, invented her own genre which I will abstain from labelling but rather encourage my readers to experience for themselves when the book is brought out this December by the adventurous Texas publisher Deep Vellum. The magnificent heterotopia, constructed by the Portugese author out of the debris of European history and culture, brings together Thomas Müntzer, the leader of the ill-fated peasant uprising during the early Reformation, St. John of the Cross, the Spanish Catholic mystic and poet whose masterpiece Dark Night of the Soul (La noche oscura del alma) narrates the peregrination of the soul on its way to the unity with God, and Friedrich Nietzsche, a rebel philosopher par excellence. The real protagonist of this tripartite extravaganza, however, is the sensual and cerebral Ana de Peñalosa, the major driving force of the community of rebels. She is also a mystic, as well as an intellectual whose goal is to recreate some kind of transcendental space exclusively devoted to knowledge. Known today as just a marginal figure to whom St. John of the Cross dedicated the four stanzas of The Living Flame Of Love (Llama de amor viva), Ana de Peñalosa takes centre stage in Geography of Rebels to tell her story and the story of a Europe torn between the Reformation and Counter-reformation in a unique and utterly absorbing manner, weaving a complex tapestry of allegories, symbols, allusions and revelations, which is likely to invite just as many interpretations and learned discussions as the poetic heritage of her more renowned admirer. - theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/forthcoming-geography-of-rebels-trilogy-by-maria-gabriela-llansol/
Maria Gabriela Llansol (1931-2008) is one of the preeminent Portuguese writers of the 20th century, twice awarded the prize for best novel from the Portuguese Writers' Association.