Every once in a while I find a book so dense that it seems impenetrable. The kind of book that requires research to read. Like Joyce’s Ulysses (I took an entire course on Joyce in college) or Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury (Cliff Notes provided by my High School English teacher). I’ve always enjoyed information mining. But, the Geography of Rebels Trilogy is next level… I can’t imagine who the intended audience was or is.
It’s not a bad book. I find it fascinating, though I don’t entirely understand it. Llansol plays with language in ways I’ve never encountered, and her translator Audrey Young does an excellent job of conveying this. Pick a page at random – one of the benefits of a book that doesn’t recognize linear structure – and read. There’s always something interesting happening at a sentence level.
Anyone coming to Llansol with any kind of “normal” expectations at all will likely be disappointed. Plot, logical structure, continuity, a sense of linear time and/or space— you won’t find any of that here. At least not in any form that is readily apparent. Instead, Llansol immerses her readers in a shared hallucinatory vision, seemingly fueled by religious hysteria and open to multiple interpretations.
The key into Llansol is provided by Benjamin Moser in an extremely helpful afterword, which I recommend reading before delving into the Geography of Rebels. In it Moser explains that, while in exile with her husband in Belgium, Llansol “discovered an institution peculiar to the Low Countries: the beguinage, medieval hostels that offered refuge to spiritually inclined laypeople.” These hostels were built for women who did not wish or intend to take holy orders but wanted to live a life of religious contemplation and celibacy. They still exist today. And it was after visiting one such beguinage in Bruges that Llansol “suddenly understood that ‘several levels of reality were deepening their roots, coexisting without any intervention of time.’”
This small insight into the author’s history helps to explain the real-life, historical figures she chose to populate the pages of her books——a veritable who’s who of medieval Christian mystics throughout the ages. Saint John of the Cross was a 16th-century Spanish Carmelite priest and mystic, still revered in Spain for his poetry. One poem, in particular, stands out—his Spiritual Canticle, in which he coined the phrase “the dark night of the soul.” Ana de Peñalosa was his patron, with whom he corresponded. (Llansol lifts whole quotes directly from the letters John wrote Ana de Peñalosa). Thomas Müntzer, a German theologian alive at the turn of the 15th century was imprisoned and tortured, as was John, for his faith. In the pages of Llansol’s book all three talk and interact like old friends (despite Müntzer walking around with his severed head in his hands, having died seventeen years prior to John’s birth).
READER AT LARGE 