Forthcoming: Geography of Rebels Trilogy by Maria Gabriela Llansol

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 Portuguese 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.