INTERNATIONAL PRAISE FOR MARIA GABRIELA LLANSOL
“A kiss that awakens the sleeping beauty, that causes it to leap up; not a quiet awakening, but a leap forward, leap upon leap, an excessive leap, beyond the limits of the leap—a leap forward. Thus Llansol’s text. At times we seem to be in the calm, expected sea, and then suddenly, those sentences that make us stop, that demand we read with a pencil, underline, salvage the sentence from that place, from the book, carrying it to the everyday, to reality.”
—GONÇALO TAVARES, author of Klaus Klump: A Man
“Imagine Clarice Lispector speaking with specters. Imagine Emily Dickinson seeking and finding a community. Imagine Hilda Hilst rebelling further into the madding crowd. Imagine Virginia Woolf as a Lisbon-born medium channeling displaced waves of consciousness. Imagine Fernando Pessoa as a woman building edenic spaces outside of our time-space continuum. If you can imagine some amalgamation of these descriptors, you may come close to conjuring up the writings of Maria Gabriela Llansol, but you can never quite know their protean beauty until you have entered these textual landscapes for yourself, and discovered the alternate realities they open up, where time feels simultaneously historical and ahistorical, and space simultaneously geographical and ageographical. We are fortunate that Audrey Young has translated Llansol’s Geography of Rebels Trilogy into English... Now we no longer have an excuse to overlook Llansol’s idiosyncratic genius.”
—TYLER MALONE, Literary Hub
“Llansol’s writing weaves together her life and those of her figures (not characters), drawn from history and fiction, in a[n] intricate dialogue that questions the nature of literature itself. Her ‘organic,’ overlapping works seem to defy the sense of an ending, even when they deal explicitly with death.”
—CLAIRE WILLIAMS, A vida pós-dor: Love and Loss in Maria Gabriela Llansol
“In contemporary Portuguese literature, Maria Gabriela Llansol occupies a special place, characterized by a singularity of writing that distances itself from the narrative, the descriptive, and the psychological, breaking the boundaries between literary genres and constantly soliciting our active participation.”
—MARIA GRACIETE BESSE, Professor of Portuguese at the University of Paris-Sorbonne
“For both philosophers and Llansol, only writing and literature can attain a state of illumination or revelation in the text.”
—Transcultural Encounters Amongst Women: Redrawing Boundaries in Hispanic and Lusophone Art, Literature and Film
“Her literature deviates from the usual meanings of words in an attempt to circumvent the imposture of language.”
—TATIANA SALEM LEVY, LitCult
“The works of…Maria Gabriela Llansol are beyond the senses, mere sensuismo and the correlative sensorial fluxismo.”
—L’Obéissance est Mort
Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
deepvellum.org · @deepvellum
Deep Vellum Publishing is a 501c3
nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.
Originally published as three novels:
The Book of Communities was first published as
O Livro das Comunidades, © 1977 Afrontamento, Porto, Portugal
The Remaining Life was first published as
A Restante Vida, © 1983 Afrontamento, Porto, Portugal
In the House of July and August was first published as
Na Casa de Julho e Agosto © 1984, Afrontamento, Porto, Portugal
English translation copyright © 2018 by Audrey Young
ISBN: 978-1-941920-64-0 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938734
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Funded by the Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas.
Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz · annazylicz.com
Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo
Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.
Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.
Table of Contents
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Introduction by Gonçales M. Tavares
IN THE HOUSE OF JULY AND AUGUST
2nd Part: The Headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates
3rd Part: The Ladies of Complete Love
Llansol, poet of the Posthumous by Benjamin Moser
Author and Translator Biographies
ON THE WRITING OF MARIA GABRIELA LLANSOL
“At the level of movement, I went to Sintra, read Hölderlin” (MGL)
There