In the mid-1980s she moved back to Portugal, to the historic hilltop town of Sintra, and from then on published almost one book a year, largely ignored by the general public but gradually gathering a loyal, diverse group of readers, including academics and even the current president of the European commission, José Manuel Barroso, who has called her writing "intense and sublime". ![]() So did the perspective afforded by living and working in a foreign language, in an isolated community far from home. The experience of educating children from a variety of backgrounds and nationalities - some with problems such as autism or Down's syndrome - influenced her work considerably. While living in the hamlet of Herbais, Llansol immersed herself in literature, philosophy and theology, particularly the social history of Europe and medieval mystic poets. The couple became part of a cooperative that ran an experimental school, and also made and sold furniture and food. In 1965 she and her husband Augusto Joaquim moved to Belgium, in voluntary exile from the repressive regime of António de Oliveira Salazar. She then ran a nursery school before publishing her first short stories in 1962, inspired by her interaction with children. She graduated with a degree in law from Lisbon University in 1955 and two years later obtained a degree in educational sciences. She was born in Lisbon, where her bibliophile father was chief accountant at a paper factory and her doting mother a housewife. Llansol appropriates figures like Saint John of the Cross and Thomas Mu¨ntzer and pulls them into a transhistorical dialogue, constructing a succession of what she calls “luminous scenes,” where they coexist outside of time. It is the first volume of Geography of Rebels, a trilogy of novellas mapping a series of encounters between poets, mystics, beguines and heretics, all of which take place in another version of the medieval war between peasants and princes in Central Europe. ![]() (They “correspond to inner earthquakes,” she would say in an interview.) Her first novel, The Book of Communities, was published in 1977. Eliding any sense of plot, her texts instead transcribe the movements of bodies and animals and light. Unlike her contemporaries back in Portugal, she did not write to describe reality, but rather to exist through the process of writing. She would spend twenty years there in voluntary exile, teaching at the local school, translating Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and reading medieval mystics. In 1965, Llansol left Lisbon and moved to an isolated village in the Belgian countryside. Despite this body of work, only a few short pages have ever been translated into English. Upon her death in 2008, she left behind twenty-seven published books and more than seventy unpublished notebooks, all of which evade any traditional definitions of genre. ![]() Although entirely unknown in the United States, she twice won the award for best novel from the Portuguese Writers’ Association with her textually idiosyncratic, fragmentary, and densely poetic writing other recipients of this prize include José Saramago and António Lobos Antunes. Sangsuk's novel is a celebration of the oral tradition of storytelling and, above all else, a testament to the power of stories to entertain.Maria Gabriela Llansol (1931-2008) is a singular figure in Portuguese literature, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, yet never before translated into English. Nightly, he entertains the children of his village with tales from his younger years: his long pilgrimage to India, his mother's dreams of a more stable life through agriculture, his proud huntsman father who resisted those dreams, and his love, who led him to pursue those dreams all over again. e before agrarian and then capitalist life took over his community. The Understory (Trade Paperback / Paperback)īy Sangsuk, Saneh Translated by Poopoksakul, MuiĪ novel of man's relationship with nature, power, and the vitality of storytelling, from beloved Thai author Saneh Sangsuk.The lovable, yarnspinning monk Luang Paw Tien, now in his nineties, is the last person in his village to bear witness to the power and plenitude of the jungl.
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