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Geografia de Rebeldes #1-3
Geography of Rebels Trilogy: The Book of Communities, The Remaining Life, and In the House of July & August
A major discovery, with echoes of Clarice Lispector, Llansol's groundbreaking linked novellas present her unique literary vision of writing as lived life, conjuring historical figures and their ideas into her world. "I live what I have written (and what I have yet to write), as posthumous work. Its longevity will outlive mine. It will have to exist by itself."
280 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2018
About the author
Maria Gabriela Llansol
64 books92 followersMARIA GABRIELA LLANSOL nasceu a 24 de Novembro de 1931, em Lisboa. Licenciou-se em Direito e em Ciências Pedagógicas, tendo trabalhado em áreas relacionadas com problemas educacionais. Em 1965, abandonou Portugal para se fixar na Bélgica. Regressou há alguns anos a Portugal. É um caso ímpar na ficção contemporânea, de jorrante, inesperada e original criatividade. De estilo muito próprio, a sua forte personalidade afirmou-se desde 1957, com as narrativas de Os Pregos na Erva, consolidando-se com O Livro das Comunidades, 1978, e com todas as suas obras posteriores, de que poderemos salientar A Restante Vida, 1978, e Um Beijo Dado mais tarde, 1990, e Lisboaleipzig, 1994 e 1995. Aliando a subjectividade enunciativa a um forte pendor mítico de implicação lírica, que funda numa visão da vida e do mundo de tipo religioso herético, sensualista e naturalista, a sua ficção caracteriza-se por uma hibridez de registos e de convocação, temporal e espacial de entidades, que no entanto assume uma coesão que lhe é dada por uma marca discursiva persistente e inconfundível. Faleceu a 3 de Março de 2008, em Sintra.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 12, 2019
I like reading experimental fiction a lot. But even within the area of experimental fiction, this is the hardest book I’ve come across in a long while. I’ve read the first novella twice and I’ve read another two. And I am still at loss what I am supposed to feel or think about it. It is really hard for me to decipher.
Maria Gabriella Llamsol is a prominent Portugese writer who spent a substantial part of her life in exile in Belgium during Salazar’s years. She came back to Portugal in the 80s and died in 2008 there at the age of 76. During the last 30 years of her life she was a prolific writer. She never wrote with thinking about her potential readership, but acquired almost cult status, especially between the other writers in Portugal. She was awarded the highest Portugal literary award twice. But she was never translated into English before. This book is her first publication in English.
Her writing style is very unique. She uses the page space creatively writing in columns or leaving blank spaces between the words. Her writing is very poetic. If i would compare her to anyone, it would be Virginia Woolf. Look for example on this passage:
He leaned against the wall, retreating. In an instant, he crossed the place of Fontiveros, where the houses are lime white that ; at the same instant, in the garden of Penuela, he remained in prayer all night and, in the morning, they saw him rise up from the earth the top of the table was rectangular yellow, the predominant colour of the air in Fontiveros and, when it was made into water, it became, in the second layer, a mirror; a wind like that from the river passed by, a wave rose up, a candle was lit within it (the room’s lamp was extinguished, the daylight disappeared): in the candlelight, our faces and handwritings intertwine; they lay in shadow, our severed left hands of Ana de Peñalosa, and they replace the duplicate pages: the second layer broken, they both appeared in a fetal position, mouths dirty with the milk of words; raised in the air, the candle went out, the room’s lamp was extinguished, the daylight disappeared.
It is a beautiful writing. But i found her much harder to comprehend. I understood that she was devoted to Catholic mysticism. So maybe my lack of any background knowledge of the tradition did not help. Her characters (she called them figures) in this trilogy are historical personalities:
Saint John of the Cross - 15th century Spanish Carmelite monk and the writer of mystical poetry;
Ana de Penalosa - the widow and benefactor of St John of the Cross
Hadewijch - 13the century Dutch female mystic poet
Muntzer - 15th century German religious and peasant’s revolt leader who was subsequently beheaded
Nietzsche - well, we all know him
All these and many other characters are visiting the main protagonist in constantly changing shapes and forms. Sometimes they are people, sometimes they become animals. Sometimes she sees their writing or see them in different period of their life. There was even a tree as a character. I understood that the main female protagonist is the author herself. But some other reviewers are saying she is Ana de Penalosa. In many ways it does not matter as the novel is a tapestry of visions formed in words. They are often beautiful, but I needed to dismiss with the idea of comprehension of the text as whole.
The first two novellas are framed with short texts in italics signed A. Borges. I guess it is a tribute to J L Borges, or maybe not. But these two texts I think give hint to what she intended to achieve in the main body sandwiched in between. And as far as I understood, the idea was to reject the linearity of time or actuality of death. She talks of ‘Remaining life” which is expressed in writing.”Speaking and negotiating, producing and exploring, construct, in effect, the happenings of Power. Writing accompanies the density of Remaining life, of the body’s other Form, which, I tell you here is: Landscape. Writing glimpses, it cannot be used to confine. Writing as in this book, fatally brings power to the loss of memory.”
Also i think, these books is an attempt to write the history from the perspective of the common people, absent from historical books:
“History does not represent poor man. What was left to us is conception of reality, the shadow, the empty space and a virtuality. Princes wanted only one reality. We ended up thinking there is only one reality. … Even in 3 centuries this reflection remains: reality is social there is only one reality, and it isn’t our own, unless because of wealth, cunning, or merit we believe ourselves to be princes. … What else is history if not the place where the powerful incarnate their ghosts, achievements.”
Overall, the philosophic and religious credo of these novellas could be summarised by this quote from the end of the second novella:
“It is in exile, in the outside of the outside, that the network of figures, like Ana de Penalise, Nietzsche, Saint John of the Cross, Elkhart, Muntzer, Hadewijch and the others, takes root in order to receive the myth of the remaining life, and wonders whether there will be a place in the human body, among their bodies, where fantastic cosmogonic changes correspond to incredibly slow social mutations.
Since no life can ever be lost.”
Sounds a bit like Derida’s writing to me. I needed to read these 3 lines for about 10 times before I got a gist of meaning. I think i would need to read these books a few times to get to a glimpse of their meaning properly. On the other hand, one might just enjoy the poetic language which is a plenty in there as well.
Maria Gabriella Llamsol is a prominent Portugese writer who spent a substantial part of her life in exile in Belgium during Salazar’s years. She came back to Portugal in the 80s and died in 2008 there at the age of 76. During the last 30 years of her life she was a prolific writer. She never wrote with thinking about her potential readership, but acquired almost cult status, especially between the other writers in Portugal. She was awarded the highest Portugal literary award twice. But she was never translated into English before. This book is her first publication in English.
Her writing style is very unique. She uses the page space creatively writing in columns or leaving blank spaces between the words. Her writing is very poetic. If i would compare her to anyone, it would be Virginia Woolf. Look for example on this passage:
He leaned against the wall, retreating. In an instant, he crossed the place of Fontiveros, where the houses are lime white that ; at the same instant, in the garden of Penuela, he remained in prayer all night and, in the morning, they saw him rise up from the earth the top of the table was rectangular yellow, the predominant colour of the air in Fontiveros and, when it was made into water, it became, in the second layer, a mirror; a wind like that from the river passed by, a wave rose up, a candle was lit within it (the room’s lamp was extinguished, the daylight disappeared): in the candlelight, our faces and handwritings intertwine; they lay in shadow, our severed left hands of Ana de Peñalosa, and they replace the duplicate pages: the second layer broken, they both appeared in a fetal position, mouths dirty with the milk of words; raised in the air, the candle went out, the room’s lamp was extinguished, the daylight disappeared.
It is a beautiful writing. But i found her much harder to comprehend. I understood that she was devoted to Catholic mysticism. So maybe my lack of any background knowledge of the tradition did not help. Her characters (she called them figures) in this trilogy are historical personalities:
Saint John of the Cross - 15th century Spanish Carmelite monk and the writer of mystical poetry;
Ana de Penalosa - the widow and benefactor of St John of the Cross
Hadewijch - 13the century Dutch female mystic poet
Muntzer - 15th century German religious and peasant’s revolt leader who was subsequently beheaded
Nietzsche - well, we all know him
All these and many other characters are visiting the main protagonist in constantly changing shapes and forms. Sometimes they are people, sometimes they become animals. Sometimes she sees their writing or see them in different period of their life. There was even a tree as a character. I understood that the main female protagonist is the author herself. But some other reviewers are saying she is Ana de Penalosa. In many ways it does not matter as the novel is a tapestry of visions formed in words. They are often beautiful, but I needed to dismiss with the idea of comprehension of the text as whole.
The first two novellas are framed with short texts in italics signed A. Borges. I guess it is a tribute to J L Borges, or maybe not. But these two texts I think give hint to what she intended to achieve in the main body sandwiched in between. And as far as I understood, the idea was to reject the linearity of time or actuality of death. She talks of ‘Remaining life” which is expressed in writing.”Speaking and negotiating, producing and exploring, construct, in effect, the happenings of Power. Writing accompanies the density of Remaining life, of the body’s other Form, which, I tell you here is: Landscape. Writing glimpses, it cannot be used to confine. Writing as in this book, fatally brings power to the loss of memory.”
Also i think, these books is an attempt to write the history from the perspective of the common people, absent from historical books:
“History does not represent poor man. What was left to us is conception of reality, the shadow, the empty space and a virtuality. Princes wanted only one reality. We ended up thinking there is only one reality. … Even in 3 centuries this reflection remains: reality is social there is only one reality, and it isn’t our own, unless because of wealth, cunning, or merit we believe ourselves to be princes. … What else is history if not the place where the powerful incarnate their ghosts, achievements.”
Overall, the philosophic and religious credo of these novellas could be summarised by this quote from the end of the second novella:
“It is in exile, in the outside of the outside, that the network of figures, like Ana de Penalise, Nietzsche, Saint John of the Cross, Elkhart, Muntzer, Hadewijch and the others, takes root in order to receive the myth of the remaining life, and wonders whether there will be a place in the human body, among their bodies, where fantastic cosmogonic changes correspond to incredibly slow social mutations.
Since no life can ever be lost.”
Sounds a bit like Derida’s writing to me. I needed to read these 3 lines for about 10 times before I got a gist of meaning. I think i would need to read these books a few times to get to a glimpse of their meaning properly. On the other hand, one might just enjoy the poetic language which is a plenty in there as well.
Read
November 23, 2017The Untranslated (translated) ::
https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com...
https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com...
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October 6, 2020Problems with Dream Logic
These are notes on "The Book of Communities" (1974), first of the trilogy translated in this book.
1. The layout of the pages
Llansol (pronounced, roughly, Yensol) has been compared to Clarice Lispector and, more distantly, to Pessoa and, still more distantly, to Dickinson (whom Llansol translated). One striking similarity with Dickinson is the odd gaps in Llansol's paragraphs, which are like Dickinson's increasingly wayward dashes:
...they laughed, they listened to the voice that slowly read what
they had written and, in the end, even imitated their laughter you
must know that a soul laughter must generally pass first
through two nights that the mystics call purgations laughter or
...
never again bring me a message that doesn't know how to tell me
what I want. The door closed with a soft
disturbance of air
which agitated the scarf
which wrote to look for the book; a short phrase, once found, was lost
again... [18-19]
(In these excerpts, you have to imagine the words "what," "you," "first," "or," "me," and "lost" are right-justified.) The text in general is right-justified, but with gaps, and at times it breaks into shorter left-justified lines, mimicking blank verse. As in Dickinson's dashes, some of these gaps make sense ("laughter" does), and others are difficult to interpret. The effect isn't so much prose alternating with poetry as prose broken by thoughts that have not been written. (I wonder if any of Dickinson's dashes can be read that way.)
2. Dramatis personae
In the book, Ana wanders around her house, and through landscapes, in the intermittent company of a half-dozen other people: St. John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz); the early 16th c. German reformer Thomas Müntzer; Henry Suso, the 14th c. German mystic; Meister Eckhart, the early 14th c. German mystic; and Nietzsche. Sometimes these characters are people, and other times they are animals, and a loosely dream-like logic is maintained throughout. The main character, Ana de Mercado y Peñalosa, funded the tomb of St. John of the Cross in Segovia, and may have been the woman he said he loved in the poem "Llama de amor viva."
The presence in the book of an unknown person (Ana) together with well-known people (St. John of the Cross, Eckhart, Suso, Nietzsche) and several perhaps less-known people (Müntzer) makes for a dream-like atmosphere. At one point Ana shaves Nietzsche's moustache (she describes one of the photographs taken lae in his life) and his head, and he falls asleep on top of her. Other characters are more ethereal or surreal. Müntzer was beheaded, and his head falls into various scenes.
The entire book is about writing, and in a sense all the characters are writing, or thinking of writing. Writing takes places in memories, on paper, as metaphors of light and water. And as Benjamin Moser notes in the Afterword, there is a remendous loneliness in the book: it was written in exile, in Brussels, and its author had little hope anyone would ever read it.
All this is makes for a memorable combination: disparate historical characters, most of them mystics or theologians, and a waking dream of solitude disarticulated by unexplained gaps. "The Book of Communities" has no real structure. It is a continuous dreamlike meditation on writing. In that sense it is like a combination of Lispector and St. John of the Cross (or Eckhart), and it also made me think of spectral music (Grisey, Murail), which was contemporaneous.
3. Issues with the dream logic
Reading becomes difficult, for me, whenever any of the characters is named, which happens several times on some pages. With a few exceptions, Llansol does not have her historical characters quote their own writing, and none behave in ways that can be connected to what they wrote. All of them drift in and out of the narrator's imagination with equal freedom. This wouldn't be an issue if I hadn't read all of them (except Müntzer), so their proper names conjure many specific ideas, images, tones, voices, problems, and cadences, none of which are used by Llansol. She seems to have read only "Zarathustra" among Nietzsche's books, and I can't be sure what she has read of St. John, Eckhart, or Suso.
In an abstract sense this shouldn't matter, because what counts is what they say and do in the novel: but it does matter, because readers will bring their own knowledge with them, and that will be continuously unaccountably distracting. On the other hand, if Llansol had used only Ana's name, or perhaps only Müntzer's (who has read him, or even read about him? Scholars of the Reformation?), then the oddity of the book would be reduced, and it would be less memorable.
A solution might have been to quote just selected words from each writer: that would have signaled to readers that those writers were included for particular lines or images. Alternatively, the writers might have behaved more differently from one another, signaling the author's interests in their imagined presences. As it is, they are mainly walking proper name tags. That logic works in dreams, where a Meister Eckhart might make an appearance without needing to explain himself, but not in novels, where an actual public, no matter how distant from the author's life, is waiting to know whether they are included in the author's dream, or merely ignored.
These are notes on "The Book of Communities" (1974), first of the trilogy translated in this book.
1. The layout of the pages
Llansol (pronounced, roughly, Yensol) has been compared to Clarice Lispector and, more distantly, to Pessoa and, still more distantly, to Dickinson (whom Llansol translated). One striking similarity with Dickinson is the odd gaps in Llansol's paragraphs, which are like Dickinson's increasingly wayward dashes:
...they laughed, they listened to the voice that slowly read what
they had written and, in the end, even imitated their laughter you
must know that a soul laughter must generally pass first
through two nights that the mystics call purgations laughter or
...
never again bring me a message that doesn't know how to tell me
what I want. The door closed with a soft
disturbance of air
which agitated the scarf
which wrote to look for the book; a short phrase, once found, was lost
again... [18-19]
(In these excerpts, you have to imagine the words "what," "you," "first," "or," "me," and "lost" are right-justified.) The text in general is right-justified, but with gaps, and at times it breaks into shorter left-justified lines, mimicking blank verse. As in Dickinson's dashes, some of these gaps make sense ("laughter" does), and others are difficult to interpret. The effect isn't so much prose alternating with poetry as prose broken by thoughts that have not been written. (I wonder if any of Dickinson's dashes can be read that way.)
2. Dramatis personae
In the book, Ana wanders around her house, and through landscapes, in the intermittent company of a half-dozen other people: St. John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz); the early 16th c. German reformer Thomas Müntzer; Henry Suso, the 14th c. German mystic; Meister Eckhart, the early 14th c. German mystic; and Nietzsche. Sometimes these characters are people, and other times they are animals, and a loosely dream-like logic is maintained throughout. The main character, Ana de Mercado y Peñalosa, funded the tomb of St. John of the Cross in Segovia, and may have been the woman he said he loved in the poem "Llama de amor viva."
The presence in the book of an unknown person (Ana) together with well-known people (St. John of the Cross, Eckhart, Suso, Nietzsche) and several perhaps less-known people (Müntzer) makes for a dream-like atmosphere. At one point Ana shaves Nietzsche's moustache (she describes one of the photographs taken lae in his life) and his head, and he falls asleep on top of her. Other characters are more ethereal or surreal. Müntzer was beheaded, and his head falls into various scenes.
The entire book is about writing, and in a sense all the characters are writing, or thinking of writing. Writing takes places in memories, on paper, as metaphors of light and water. And as Benjamin Moser notes in the Afterword, there is a remendous loneliness in the book: it was written in exile, in Brussels, and its author had little hope anyone would ever read it.
All this is makes for a memorable combination: disparate historical characters, most of them mystics or theologians, and a waking dream of solitude disarticulated by unexplained gaps. "The Book of Communities" has no real structure. It is a continuous dreamlike meditation on writing. In that sense it is like a combination of Lispector and St. John of the Cross (or Eckhart), and it also made me think of spectral music (Grisey, Murail), which was contemporaneous.
3. Issues with the dream logic
Reading becomes difficult, for me, whenever any of the characters is named, which happens several times on some pages. With a few exceptions, Llansol does not have her historical characters quote their own writing, and none behave in ways that can be connected to what they wrote. All of them drift in and out of the narrator's imagination with equal freedom. This wouldn't be an issue if I hadn't read all of them (except Müntzer), so their proper names conjure many specific ideas, images, tones, voices, problems, and cadences, none of which are used by Llansol. She seems to have read only "Zarathustra" among Nietzsche's books, and I can't be sure what she has read of St. John, Eckhart, or Suso.
In an abstract sense this shouldn't matter, because what counts is what they say and do in the novel: but it does matter, because readers will bring their own knowledge with them, and that will be continuously unaccountably distracting. On the other hand, if Llansol had used only Ana's name, or perhaps only Müntzer's (who has read him, or even read about him? Scholars of the Reformation?), then the oddity of the book would be reduced, and it would be less memorable.
A solution might have been to quote just selected words from each writer: that would have signaled to readers that those writers were included for particular lines or images. Alternatively, the writers might have behaved more differently from one another, signaling the author's interests in their imagined presences. As it is, they are mainly walking proper name tags. That logic works in dreams, where a Meister Eckhart might make an appearance without needing to explain himself, but not in novels, where an actual public, no matter how distant from the author's life, is waiting to know whether they are included in the author's dream, or merely ignored.
January 8, 2026
2nd reading: 6 7 .. 6/7 .. six seven .. palms supine hands palpitating, haha! Llansol died at age 76 and she was most definitely an invert to meaning in the traditional sense. She claimed to be getting at the 'core of being' through her writing, ok, I'll buy that. Spinozaistic was dropped in the epilogue; I'll buy that too. My phrase for her scibbs - a mystic mess of discombobulation thrown wily-nilly against the frig not to ascertain texture but rather to unravel meaning of digestion. A second reading was absolutely necessary. I read with an esoteric mindset skipping around, slicing/dicing words/sentences/paragraphs selecting/interposing/reassembling to MAKE MY OWN MEANING. Viola/wha-laah .. there limpidity began appearing, somewhat, anyway. @she/glow?
1st reading: Haha ,, go ahead A.I. and try to write this .. never happen. I'd say it may have required more energy to READ this book than to write it. Really. Little did I know that reading the Christian mystics simultaneously would unlock these tumblers of wording to reveal nothingness.
1st reading: Haha ,, go ahead A.I. and try to write this .. never happen. I'd say it may have required more energy to READ this book than to write it. Really. Little did I know that reading the Christian mystics simultaneously would unlock these tumblers of wording to reveal nothingness.
May 7, 2023
This luminous trilogy is a work that defies traditional narrative form, chronological logic and the distinction between the living and dead. The "rebels" of the title include controversial, even heretical figures from the past including John of the Cross, radical Protestant Thomas Müntzer, Friedrich Nietzsche, 13th century mystic Hadewijch, Meister Eckhart and more. Writing, language, books and knowledge play a key metaphysical role in this connected set of novellas that unfold as a series of scenes or vignettes in which voices shift, human and animal forms trade places, while the violent upheaval of the Counter Reformation plays out in the background.
A much longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/05/07/a-...
A much longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/05/07/a-...
September 28, 2024
Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IYcO...
Not my cup of tea...
Not my cup of tea...
August 17, 2026
Embriaguez inconexa, profundamente sentida, de mistico sufrir, alegoría animal, silencio pétreo y sinsentido cósmico. Todo ello envuelto en languidez lírica y reiteración litúrgica oracional...
¿El resultado? ¿El proceso? Me encojo de hombros como nunca lo había hecho previamente... He leido a Lima o a Sarduy, a Celan y a Rulfo, a Joyce y a Elliot, Pound o Huidobro, pero esto es algo diferente e inedito...
¿Funciona? No sé. Es potente, áureo, pero quizás inconexo, disfuncional...Un agujero total.
Fragmentariamente es una poesía bella de oquedades enigmáticas. Pero, al extenderse, consiguiendo su efecto más original, se arruga como un pergamino de fórmulas mortuorias, llegándome a adormilar.
¿Lo recomiendo? Rotundamente sí: no se lo pierdan. Ahora bien, no sé que pensar ni como será juzgado en unos años. Es como escuchar a Árvo Part durante horas y horas...
¿El resultado? ¿El proceso? Me encojo de hombros como nunca lo había hecho previamente... He leido a Lima o a Sarduy, a Celan y a Rulfo, a Joyce y a Elliot, Pound o Huidobro, pero esto es algo diferente e inedito...
¿Funciona? No sé. Es potente, áureo, pero quizás inconexo, disfuncional...Un agujero total.
Fragmentariamente es una poesía bella de oquedades enigmáticas. Pero, al extenderse, consiguiendo su efecto más original, se arruga como un pergamino de fórmulas mortuorias, llegándome a adormilar.
¿Lo recomiendo? Rotundamente sí: no se lo pierdan. Ahora bien, no sé que pensar ni como será juzgado en unos años. Es como escuchar a Árvo Part durante horas y horas...
June 8, 2022
These three novellas of inscrutable prose poetry don't make for the most enjoyable read. I appreciate them more retroactively than I did when I was reading them. The language and imagery possess a warmth and vividness that linger even after the book is done. Llansol's work is remarkable for its depiction of womanhood, of being a woman in a man's world, and of the Earth. There is something ancient and mystical running though the book, lending Llansol's work quite a different feel from any writer I can think to compare her to. Several scenes stand out to me for their depictions of the natural world, or for their sheer bizarreness. But it is mostly inscrutable. Not for the faint of heart.
Selected quotes:
"Between the hidden sun,
a downpour of rain at three o’clock in the afternoon,
I spent my final day. I sat down on the promised bench at the back of the garden, where I can see the magnitude of the green sweeping over the plants; without my knowing whether they come from the weather, or the transparent vegetal world; there are a thousand scents, and trappings of hatred circulating, and a heat tempered with delicacy and elevation; it becomes clear that I am in my place of return, at dusk, next to the ivy.
I reply: — If I stay here, I will look for the river."
"Today the silence is even more copious than usual, as if a crystal of ice had been broken; I hear nothing and I hear everything in this silence foreign to knowledge which is my eternal horizon on this day without month and without year: the rivers think they are alive just like the living; in these mountains I come into contact with them, with their dense geometric splendor; they open up to me tangibly in the triple aspects of line, surface, and volume; linear paths correspond to itineraries of perennial streams whose turbulence is only expressed in times of flood. Their manifestation in the landscape is a riverbed. Glaciers are real, and they confound."
Selected quotes:
"Between the hidden sun,
a downpour of rain at three o’clock in the afternoon,
I spent my final day. I sat down on the promised bench at the back of the garden, where I can see the magnitude of the green sweeping over the plants; without my knowing whether they come from the weather, or the transparent vegetal world; there are a thousand scents, and trappings of hatred circulating, and a heat tempered with delicacy and elevation; it becomes clear that I am in my place of return, at dusk, next to the ivy.
I reply: — If I stay here, I will look for the river."
"Today the silence is even more copious than usual, as if a crystal of ice had been broken; I hear nothing and I hear everything in this silence foreign to knowledge which is my eternal horizon on this day without month and without year: the rivers think they are alive just like the living; in these mountains I come into contact with them, with their dense geometric splendor; they open up to me tangibly in the triple aspects of line, surface, and volume; linear paths correspond to itineraries of perennial streams whose turbulence is only expressed in times of flood. Their manifestation in the landscape is a riverbed. Glaciers are real, and they confound."
August 16, 2019
Vivid, densely lush, incandescent... this is body(-)writing. I keep asking myself just how deep is she trying to go with femininity. You want to be in Llansol's world if you want to get in touch with how sense-memories crossover: hands see and eyes touch. This book presents ego-death through a Christian mystical lens that unpacked my own experiences in an ecstatically intimate way. This book questions what it means to be at peace.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 22, 2022
Throughout enduring this trilogy, there were moments of excitement, intriguing diction, lush importance; there were also long moments of utter incoherence, singularly significant symbolism for the author but not the reader, obscure references, and disjointed "plot". This book is an experience, and I'm not sure of what nature. Impressionistic for sure, and worth experiencing to understand this body of work exists and represents a key artist from Portugal, but....mostly I am left thinking WTF?
Read
July 21, 2026
no on can speak
of the depths of the spirit,
unless they have a spirit
of fathomless depths
I'm not going to attempt a wade-in on the age-old argument of the line between poetry and fiction, especially not here, in connection with Llansol's enigmatic work that so beautifully (and enigmatically, I might add) erases that line, along with any other sand-lines you care to think of. Past and future, dream and reality, memory and history--all the usual suspects that at a certain artistic depth can't help but merge, blend, reform. Llansol has made it her job to go as deep as possible into this sort of blurring, and I had a hard time keeping up as she took me from Place to Place, Lesson to Lesson. At times, pages would pass before my eyes without a mote of comprehension to strike my brain, though it somehow kept me listlessly spellbound. Other times I'd get caught on single page of strange enjambment for a whole evening, enjoying the puzzle of trying to unlock some code of intent. I keep taking this off the shelf to flip through the impressions I was left with and a few things I couldn't resist underlining.
Here's one:
It was the end of the text, but a provisional end.
The next morning the dialogue with the new being began again, a silent dialogue of glances, caresses, absences, thoughts, smiles, and fear.
July 24, 2025
Lispector on crack, because damn, this is the simplest sentence in the trilogy:
If she dreamed, she dreamed of forests, and houses born from forests; and shaped like forests. The cities had been destroyed or perhaps had never existed. Heart of the Bear became a permanent place of representations, sensations, perceptions, images, icons, and myths; she had become accustomed to reading texts and seeing animals in him. His enormous, fragile paw had eyes and claws when he wrote on the ground or on paper. A great pleasure rose up from the battle and he followed it with his writing, watching.
The whole book fells like catching a signal from a dimension where narrative obeys no rules and language breathes on its own.
I'll write more when the words comes, because this book took everything..including my breaths.
If she dreamed, she dreamed of forests, and houses born from forests; and shaped like forests. The cities had been destroyed or perhaps had never existed. Heart of the Bear became a permanent place of representations, sensations, perceptions, images, icons, and myths; she had become accustomed to reading texts and seeing animals in him. His enormous, fragile paw had eyes and claws when he wrote on the ground or on paper. A great pleasure rose up from the battle and he followed it with his writing, watching.
The whole book fells like catching a signal from a dimension where narrative obeys no rules and language breathes on its own.
I'll write more when the words comes, because this book took everything..including my breaths.
March 29, 2022
I couldn’t tell what was happening (I don’t think there is really a plot?) but the language was beautiful.
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