A Thousand Thoughts in Flight

by Maria Gabriela Llansol, Audrey Young (Translator)

A remarkable collection of diary entries from cross-genre Portuguese author Maria Gabriela Llansol, which span dozens of diaries and 33 years.


"She dedicated herself to this work regularly, at the same time, in the same place, and in almost the same position…” (The Book of Communities).


Over the course of her life, Maria Gabriela Llansol wrote many thousands of pages. She left behind 70 diaries in all, which began in November 1974 and continued until 2007. Three of them were published during her lifetime.


Diary I begins the day she finishes The Book of Communities and ends the day she finishes The Remaining Life, in 1977. Diary II picks up two years later, when she is finishing In the House of July and August and beginning the second trilogy. It follows her through the second trilogy and captures her first ideas for the Lisbonleipzig duology; it is here where Bach and Pessoa begin their encounter, in 1982. Diary III is less a diary than a mourning of the death of her friend, the Portuguese writer Virgílio Ferreira, one of the only contemporary writers with whom she felt any affinity, a mapping of their relationship and a conversation between them.

494 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 16, 2024

About the author

MARIA GABRIELA LLANSOL nasceu a 24 de Novembro de 1931, em Lisboa. Licenciou-se em Direito e em Ciências Pedagógicas, tendo trabalhado em áreas relacionadas com problemas educacionais. Em 1965, abandonou Portugal para se fixar na Bélgica. Regressou há alguns anos a Portugal. É um caso ímpar na ficção contemporânea, de jorrante, inesperada e original criatividade. De estilo muito próprio, a sua forte personalidade afirmou-se desde 1957, com as narrativas de Os Pregos na Erva, consolidando-se com O Livro das Comunidades, 1978, e com todas as suas obras posteriores, de que poderemos salientar A Restante Vida, 1978, e Um Beijo Dado mais tarde, 1990, e Lisboaleipzig, 1994 e 1995. Aliando a subjectividade enunciativa a um forte pendor mítico de implicação lírica, que funda numa visão da vida e do mundo de tipo religioso herético, sensualista e naturalista, a sua ficção caracteriza-se por uma hibridez de registos e de convocação, temporal e espacial de entidades, que no entanto assume uma coesão que lhe é dada por uma marca discursiva persistente e inconfundível. Faleceu a 3 de Março de 2008, em Sintra.

Reviews

[sophia! · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Llansol's diaries the impactful authors she reads become recurring characters -- Nietzche, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Rilke, etc., sometimes directly conversing with each other -- characters from her novels extend here too; the plants in her garden are characters;

but if I remain standing in the middle of the courtyard, I will call out to Prunus Triloba, Forsythia, Aspirea, shrubs I planted with the hope of giving them my body, at the hour of my death, and replanting them during the days of my eternity. Beings that do not invade with words, that are depleted by their own scents and forms.

her writing desk is a character;

Seven sources of light, then. Such are the dwellings that many mystics have described in the accounts of their experience.
__________but the nature of my worktable is not mystical; if it were, it would join with God in a movement of its true wooden nature; as such, it only joins with beauty, and uses the sources of light to enter into communion with the sun.

a lizard she sees is a character; her pets are characters; her city is a character. The entries collect and preserve the characters and signs she interacts with in her daily life, while reflecting on the nature of texts, animals, writing, and existence as a strange being having been raised within the framework of "pervasive positivist cynicism".

Elsewhere,
I wrote that I have always enjoyed writing in a place where objects and goods are stored, because writing is a storehouse of signs_____
or its scene; I am seeing, between seeing and waiting to see, the storehouse of those signs, in a large or a small space -- and my philosophical companion comes in and says:
-- This is the storehouse of Rilke's signs; this is the storehouse of Hölderlin's signs; this is the storehouse of your Dickinson's signs; this is the storehouse of Fernando Pessoa's signs. -- And, at the end, he murmurs to no surprise of mine: -- This is the storehouse of my signs.

The phrase "fragmentary yet singular" on the back of the book is true, and somehow her entries are remarkably consistent in their fragmentariness over the 20 years spanned here, except that her later entries gradually move toward developing her conception of her role as human and writer, and basically describing The Point of a lifetime spent seeing and gathering signs. Obviously you must read it to get the whole shimmering thing and the conclusions of her introspection can very rarely be put simply or explicitly, but I think the essence is something like a service to those (characters/signs/texts) whom she loves:

When at last I hear a name, I stand up, shake off the daze, and go down to the river where those whom I love,
that is,
those to whom I want to give affective relevance in the intelligent world,
are washing their outlines.

i loved it!!!!