Tales of the Wandering Evil

Published in 1986 and reissued with an afterword by Manuel Gusmão and eight images by Ilda David, this is one of the most important books in the extensive biography of Maria Gabriela Llansol. 

Contos do Mal Errante begins by raising a question related to genres: this narrative composed of fragments is not a collection of "stories", but we know all too well that Llansol's writing forces us to rethink—after Romanticism—the invention of Literature and the blurring of genre boundaries. This narrative is made of historical material and populated by figures from the history of thought: the siege of Münster, Copernicus, Eckhart, Hadewijch.

But we are far from the historical novel, perhaps even at its antipodes, because places, time, and figures enter into constellations of figurative thought that have nothing to do with the confines of the political, with an unrepresentable "polis", which is the community as a form of intersubjective existence."

António Guerreiro in the magazine Actual (Expresso) on 11/9/2004, in 14-9-2004.

Maria Gabriela Llansol - Portuguese writer of Spanish descent, born in 1931 in Lisbon. She graduated in Law and Educational Sciences, having worked in areas related to educational issues.

In 1965, she left Portugal to settle in Belgium. She returned to Portugal in the 1980s. Considered an author whose writing is hermetic and difficult for the average reader to understand, she is nevertheless regarded by many as one of the most innovative and important names in contemporary Portuguese fiction.

Her literary career began with Os Pregos na Erva (1962), a work that inaugurated a new way of writing, although structurally it resembles a book of stories.

Taking the creation of a personal universe to its ultimate consequences, which since the 1960s has had no parallel in Portuguese literature, Maria Gabriela Llansol's work shatters the boundaries between what we call fiction, diary, poetry, essay, memoirs, etc.