It is reasonably rare, necessarily so, that a writer makes my senses quicken to a degree that I think about writing, reading, being, in ways that are interesting and useful. I’m reluctant to stop reading Maria Gabriela Llansol’s Geography of Rebels trilogy, but must at some point to follow threads back to Woolf, Spinoza, Bergson and so forth.
Llansol’s writing is peopled with figures, ‘living entities, constructs, nodes inside the text that are not necessarily people, but patterns, templates, shapes, forms, and apparitions. The Llansolian text does not progress thematically, but by an association of several scenes of fulgor in which the figures are revealed.’ To read her writing is to appreciate that we are this unceasing stream of sensory phenomena, aware at some level of bodily existence, but with an embodied memory of everything we have read and thought. Llansol’s figures are her expression of Spinoza’s intuition that ‘nevertheless we feel and know by experience that we are eternal.’
On my third pass through the first book of Llansol’s trilogy, The Book of Communities, it became clear that it is something of a roadmap for how to read her writing, that she is not just experimenting with form, but thinking differently about reality. Her narrative is formed temporally, a complex realm where past, present and future, are all arranged on a single plane. This is of course brings to mind Woolf’s treatment of interior time in Mrs. Dalloway: ‘There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.’
Llansol extends Woolf’s notion that reality is powerfully shaped by our perceptions and associative memories. Her narrator and figures are an act of continual creation, mirroring the way her writing communes with the intellect of her readers during the act of reading. As Rilke put it in The Book of a Monk’s Life, ‘a hundred drinking roots, all intertwined.’
It is hard to believe that this trilogy represents Llansol’s literary debut, as well as her first work to be translated into English. I can hardly bear that the rest of her writing remains untranslated, so I’ve begun learning Portuguese.
Time's Flow Stemmed 
Terrific, inspiring post. Thank you!
Thank you for reading and commenting. I’m pleased you enjoyed my post.
Beautiful, Anthony. And good luck learning Portuguese.
Thanks, Theresa, on both counts.
I’ve bought a copy of the trilogy, inspired by these posts of yours. Am summoning up the courage and energy to start it…Not sure I want to go so far as learning Portuguese, however – though I can order a sopa de legumes
Wonderful. Please let me know how you get on.
Wow! The fact that you’re learning a language to read an author is huge recommendation Anthony – I may have to invest….
I’ve often thought of it, German for many writers and Italian for Dante, but this is the first time I’ve started down this path to read a writer in the original.
I’ve returned at least 5 or 6 times to Rebels someti.es picking up where I left off sequentially and sometimes backtracking or turning to 10 pages at random. I’m an Anglican priest and read lots in translation. This stuff is like catnip for me…Latest project in motion…I’m tracking by character names to look for organizing threads, patterns.
There’s many useful posts on Espaço Llansol’s blog page—even mangled by Google Translate—that give some context for Llansol’s writing. It is genuinely exciting stuff.