Hearing spirits speak

It is December 25, 1975. Maria Gabriela Llansol writes in her diary of meditation, chickens, her dog, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Daybreak and the journal kept by the religious historian Mircea Eliade, of sleeping and dreaming, and of all the inherited objects accumulating around her. The five-page entry is playful and fragmentary and wonderfully free. Like many others in this collection, it is also so enigmatic that, in places, I found it almost painful to read. Llansol might not have minded this. This same Christmas Day, a few paragraphs in, she admits: “I never finish reading most of the books I begin. I become despondent or paralyzed”.

Llansol preferred to write. When she died, aged seventy-six, this Portuguese writer left behind twenty-seven published books, seventy diaries and hundreds of notebooks. She was a prolific writer, but disliked the term – “a very dubious word”. Instead she called herself “a writer being”. This better captured the idea, she said, of someone “who places her experience in text so that it remains on this Earth to be connected to the experience of others”. Apart from a number of dedicated admirers who felt that connection deeply, during her lifetime Llansol’s singular style proved too inscrutable for many. But she was prepared to wait. In 2001, seven years before she died, she wrote: “I live what I have written (and what I have yet to write), as posthumous work”.

This is the second Llansol collection to be translated into English by Audrey Young. One senses her tenacity and affinity for the work. Both books come from the Texan non-profit Deep Vellum. In 2018 this Dallas indie became the first publisher to issue any of Llansol’s work in English, with Young’s version of the three early novels that make up The Geography of Rebels Trilogy. Overlapping the fiction in subject matter as well as time, A Thousand Thoughts in Flight spans twenty-two years and comprises three volumes of published diaries: A Falcon on My Wrist (1985), Finita (1987), and Inquiry into the Four Confidences (1996).

It begins in November 1974, six months after the Carnation Revolution ended almost fifty years of dictatorship in Portugal. Llansol was still living in exile in the Belgian town of Jodoigne, having left Portugal in 1965. No explicit reference is made to the authoritarian and misogynist regime, or its demise, until we are nine months into the diary. On August 26, 1975, during a trip back to Portugal, Llansol notes: “Forty years, an entire period of oppression that ends with assertions of power, and group personal languages. Portugal, today, is not the middle of a journey, it is a departure, accomplished at great cost, for an erroneous journey. For now, they (we) are unfettered but not yet free”.

Llansol’s understanding of freedom – or control, rather – began at home, long before she could have fully grasped the politics of the “New State” under the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. From the age of four, she writes on May 31, 1979, “confounded by the familial convention of childhood, I called myself ‘the captive doe’”. Critics have compared her work with that of Clarice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson and her compatriot Fernando Pessoa: reading this entry one might add Frida Kahlo to that list. Like Kahlo, Llansol resisted distinctions between humans and animals – and spirits. “It is essential”, she notes, “to write to all beings”, including those who are no longer alive.

Llansol constantly hears the dead talking – a fourth-century holy virgin, a ninth-century Persian mystic; priests, philosophers, novelists and poets. Sometimes she replies to her circle of ghostly friends. Sometimes they speak back. Often it is hard to tell who is speaking – or who is speaking through whom. A consciousness that mingles objects, animals, spirits, the dead and the living makes her a mystic and a panpsychic, or – as she put it – “part of a kind of cosmic muck”.

That might sound fanciful, but Llansol is being serious: she is a writer of gravity. The puzzling pauses, the line breaks, the spaces between words and the frequent changes of subject are the courageous attempts of a writer desperate to capture the fullness of her life and its place in a complex world. “The pain was so sharp,” she writes on March 2, 1996, in the closing pages, “that I constantly wanted to shut my eyes because I had no words to open them”. Perhaps this was the pain I too felt as I made my way through this visionary collection.

A Thousand Thoughts in Flight is not a book to be gulped down, but its “short narratives of strangeness”, so concentrated and intense, will reward the reader who takes their time, who dips in and out, and who troubles to follow Maria Gabriela Llansol’s “gaze that smells” and “the strangeness [her] body feels and thinks”. They will be rewarded with moments of bliss.

Lara Pawson’s most recent book is Spent Light, 2024

The post Hearing spirits speak appeared first on TLS.