The Ravickians

Ravicka #2

by Renee Gladman

Fiction. LGBT Studies. African American Studies. The second volume of Gladman's Ravicka trilogy continues the author's profound meditation upon translation and the ephemeral. THE RAVICKIANS narrates the day-long odyssey of Luswage Amini, the Great Ravickian Novelist, who journeys through the city to attend the reading of an old friend. Where the earlier volume, EVENT FACTORY, explores Ravicka from the outside, via a visitor's attempt to understand and interpret that city's irreducible strangeness, THE RAVICKIANS faces the problem of translation from the perspective of an insider who struggles, throughout her account, to make plain the political and personal crises of Ravickian life that she knows to be untranslatable.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, The United States Of America, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Novels, United States

168 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 2011

About the author

Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Her most recent books are My Lesbian Novel (2024) and a reprint of her 2008 book TOAF (both also from Dorothy). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) Although this second volume in the Ravicka cycle lacks the cohesive dynamism characterizing the first book, it moves the series forward more subtly by expanding the reader's knowledge of Ravickian culture and history. It offers an insider's perspective as opposed to the outsider perspective provided in Event Factory. The focus here is more esoteric and diffuse, in part due to Gladman's exploration of the inherent impossibility of full and true communication through translation:

If you are engaged in a translation and discover that a quality you need to convey does not exist in your language, the language into which you are moving, do not pick the next best thing. Sometimes you will have to put a "0" there; this will indicate a hole.

It is in the third section of the book where the presence of such possible 'holes' in the text seemed likeliest, leading to feelings of disorientation. (Although it could also be due to the fact that this section is composed entirely of drunken dialogue.) While the nature of 'the despair' afflicting Ravicka still remains vague at this point in the series, this vagueness also feels reflective of the inexplicable nature of life's own causes and conditions, thus giving me pause in my impatience to truly know what is happening and why.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Closer to a 4.5, would have been a 5 if not for the rather flawed ending.

For all the books I've read that deal with new or mysterious or different places, I can't really think of one that attempts to evoke the experience of just being in one of those places. The Ravickians does this, and does so in a way that was one of the more compelling recent reads I've had as of late. The first book, Event Factory , had a strange outsider perspective, but most of this book takes place from the perspective of a citizen of Ravicka, the result being one that really brings about the feel of a city in transition as opposed to a lot of detail.

This book was great until the last third, where it devolves into an experimental piece of sorts that, while intended to give a deeper feel of things, resulted in my being taken completely out of the setting entirely. A lot of this is "what I wanted" as opposed to what it is, but this story, longer than either other volume that bookends up, didn't really need the diversion.

Still, this is a middle book that feels independent. It's a group of books that are really different and interesting in and of themselves. I can't wait to pick up the final volume.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange architectural odyssey in three parts -- a trek, a reading, and a night out in dialogue. The first part, set in the ephemeral cityscape poised between present and memory, is the strongest and most immediate, as well as most similar to Gladman's earlier Ravicka novel Event Factory. There's something rare and interesting unfolding across the entire cycle though: a mysterious travelogue through a city-state in an undefined state of crisis. 4th part comes out this fall!

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ravicka is under attack. Or on fire. Or crumbling from within. This second volume expands questions posed in the first, questions of translation and intelligibility and architecture and colonialism, especially relevant today, with resurgences in disdain and terror toward geographic Others.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe after the tetralogy I will have something to say. As of now, not much more than the switch in perspective from outsider in volume one, to Ravickian, looking out and having the same problem of “translation.” The reader can never get in?

[Kyle C · Rating 3 out of 5]

As in The Event Factory, the language and culture of Ravicka are untranslatable. However, whereas The Event Factory is told from the perspective of a foreigner trying to make sense of the customs and semiotics of the city, The Ravickians follows the great novelist of Ravicka, Amine, moving around the city, catching trains and buses. Whereas The Event Factory shows a naive anthropologist's grasping attempts to understand the alien nature of this city, The Ravickians is a more sentimental and elegiac story of a city that has, in some inexplicable and ineffable way, fallen into decline. The first novel is etic, the second emic, both ethereal. After some unnamed civil catastrophe (a revolution? A purge? An expulsion? A pandemic?), Ravicka has become a place of hunger, loss, loneliness, disappearances and death, and alienation. "We are surrounded and we are alone," the narrator, Amine, says. Amine roams the city thinking about its architecture, receiving mysterious courier-letters from a certain Ana Patova. Amine is confused by everything. The buildings and the monuments suggest permanence and purpose—that the city was built with intention, that it continues to exist, that it will survive into the future—and yet something metaphysical has died. The trains are "a sign of encouragement"; the governor, Vlati, declares, "Against decay, a new building goes up, intended for public service". The infrastructure and operation suggest a living vitality in the city, and yet it is visibly vacant, empty, soulless. People avoid one another; the idea of conversation with a stranger is terrifying. Urban renewal seems philosophically impossible—if the structures and the names remain the same, how can the city ever be revitalized as something new?

This is a novel about a city but more specifically about structure—the structures, buildings, cartographies, of a city—and also the mental structures of human thought—speeding trains of thought, vacant memory palaces, bridges between the mind and the other. "I want to raze one city block of my mind, to open up the entire avenue for what is to come," Amine says near the start of the novel, fusing urban planning with human cognition (in a way, it reminds of a Murnane novel—the dreamlike confounding of geography and ideation). As in Calvino's Invisible Cities, speaking of cities, imagining cities, telling stories about cities, becomes a way of talking about ideas, dreams and the imagination itself. The city becomes something purely cerebral, a semiotic marvel, a metaphor for the mind's own interior structures, its clutter, its vacancies, its chaos, what is permanent and what is possible. Yet unlike Invisible Cities, in which Marco Polo excitedly regales his audience with visions of utopian cities and their peoples, Gladman's novel laments the deterioration of a city and the collapse of a civic order. The narrator hears the speech of a friend, "But why surrender the idea of permanence? Must we lose faith in structure..." Gladman's novel is a poststructuralist work that laments the loss of structure.

It' a curious, experimental book, difficult to hang onto. I'm not sure I will continue the series.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just as intriguing as The Event Factory. For me meaning was just out of reach. Which sort of makes sense when a book is about an alien culture. However there are themes of mistranslation, loss and decay

[Zoe Tuck]

Read in 2012 I think, reread 2020

[Allan MacDonell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This second slim volume of Renee Gladman's wholly imaginary series set in a fully fabulous environment stops abruptly where I start to wonder if the author's professional friends form the basis for the chatting, precious crew of The Ravickians.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Second of Renee Gladman's books about her fictional city-state of Ravicka. The City itself is probably the biggest character, exploring additional neighborhoods & districts. The Ravickians mostly follows the Novelist who the narrator of Event Factory starts seeking in the second half of that book. It's definitely a good idea to read The Ravickians right after finishing Event Factory. One of the themes in Event Factory is the untranslatablility of a language from the perspective of an outsider, & the Ravickians continues the same theme but from the perspective of a native writer whose words are being translated into english. The story of the mysterious crisis that is hinted at, but never resolved in Event Factory is continued & explored more thoroughly. Similar to Riddley Walker in that the question of “what is going on here?” constitutes a bit of a mystery, & thus makes good re-reading.

[Rachel Kamphaus · Rating 4 out of 5]

not to sound cliche but i’ve never read anything like this. dreamlike and magnificent. sometimes too opaque for its own good though

[AK · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first book of this trilogy, Event Factory, explored the strange city of Ravicka from outsider's perspective, a visitor trying to use an unfamiliar language, trying to understand an unusual place. This book follows the 'great Ravickian novelist' Luswage Amini. I find that I am unable to describe these books in any way other than parroting the language on the back cover. They evoke vivid images and emotions, the unusual language is striking, and I sense a plot, or a point- the city is in trouble, the city both as structure/infrastructure and also the city as the web of human connections- and I do not mind that it so far seems to exist on a level that is not quite able to be articulated. I know I've read these books like I know I've had a dream.

[J.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another captivating Dorothy Project release and a nice leg in the Gladman trilogy. I'm excited to see how it finishes with Ana Potova Crosses a Bridge (and delighted by the focus already on that subject in this one).

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Is there a 4th-person narration?"--Shanxing Wang, Mad Science in Imperial City

Yes.

[Ron Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love every word of the Ravica books. For me they hit the (unusual) sweet spot between contemporary poetry and literary science fiction. There's nothing else quite like them.

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE NARRATOR OF the previous novel in Gladman's series, Event Factory, is a student of Ravickian language and culture making her/their first visit to Ravicka, anxious to impress, to avoid any faux pas, to convey somehow her/their genuine love and engagement with Ravicka. The visit does not go altogether well, though. She/they never finds exactly the right note, although many try to be helpful, like the poet Zàoter Limici. Just as the narrator is about to leave, she finds a copy of the most Ravickian of Ravickian novels, Luswage Amini's Matlatli Doc, and even accidentally passes by Amini in the street, but doesn't say a word. The connection does not happen, and the narrator goes home.

"The Great Ravickian Novelist," the first section of the series' second volume, The Ravickians, is narrated by Amini herself. We immediately notice a bristling isolation, a denial that the essentially Ravickian is knowable in any but its own terms. "If, for example, you are reading these lines in French or German, Basharac or English, these are not the lines you are reading. Rather, these are not the lines I wrote." Only in Ravickian can one know the Ravickian.

At the same time, something is amiss in Ravicka. The narrator of Event Factory had a vague sense of this throughout that novel, and she/they seems to have been right in her intuitions, for Amini and her friends are anxious about the future. Amini is looking forward to a lecture later in the evening by Zàoter Limici, who may have some insights into the problem. His lecture is the novel's second part ("Please Welcome Zàoter Limici"), and it seems to be an esoteric performance, proceeding mainly by quotation and allusion, but it also may be about opening up, letting things in, as if Ravicka has been too isolated. "I have gone on too long, my brothers," he apologizes. "And have brought the outside in with me. Your faces confirm it."

The third and final section, "Grand Horizontals," is a freewheeling, somewhat tipsy post-lecture conversation among who knows how many people, likely including not only Amini and Limici but also Ana Patova, Amini's long-lost love. There is a lot of talk of bridges--might there be some possibility of exchange or communication between the Ravickian and non-Ravickian after all? Would an influx of otherness be exactly what will restore Ravicka to health?

The next installment is titled Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, so I feel there is reason for hope.

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An odd, surreal book, in many ways the mirror image of Event Factory, the first in the series. It's divided into three parts: the first, in which novelist Luswage Amini takes a dreamlike, unsettled trip through the city of Ravicka in order to attend a friend's poetry reading; the second, which is a transcript of the reading itself; and the third, told entirely in dialogue that doesn't label who's speaking, in which a group including Amini takes a post-event ritual walk and meal. The whole thing feels like a dream, up to and including the part where it's impossible to really explain what's going on. As in Event Factory, something terrible is happening to Ravicka, but although some of the outline is clear -- people going missing, buildings disappearing, strange fires starting -- every attempt to explain the precise nature of the calamity runs into problems in communication, an inability to find the right words, and the nebulous inaccuracies always inherent in translations.

It's possible to find Gladman utterly insufferable; I still can't tell you exactly what happens at the end of the novel, and every character sounds like a deconstructivist depressive. But the way that she challenges the very possibility of communication, notes the uneasy relationship between life and architecture, and questions the fundamental nature of reality -- I'm pretty sure it's brilliant. If this sounds like a terrible exercise in pretension, there's nothing in the book that will change your mind, but if you love, say, Italo Calvino, and appreciate this kind of metafictional philosophizing, there's nobody who does it better than Gladman. I'm pretty sure each new reading of the book will yield new ideas and insights. I'm here for it.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

wish i had a syllabus to accompany this book, or a person. perhaps the reason i sunk more readily into the ravickians than the event factory (read a couple months back) is that now i've shuttled in a very immediate way between the familiar city-dweller's experience and the befuddled tourist's, can draw on the resources of both—and also because, according to a 2012 interview i found, ravicka is in no way a proxy for but wouldn't exist without new york: "I wanted to think on city living without having to think specifically of New York City living so I found this new place," gladman says in the interview. it is true that the ravicka novels are about architecture, communication, language, translation, crisis...but perhaps the obvious overarching way in which they are about cities (and the specific kinds of communication and mobility, movement, living in a city prompts) is slightly underemphasized. all of which is to say i'm looking for an easy explanation of the rightness of the strangeness and dread and delicacy i felt while reading this book on trains and in cafes in crowds in new york. and the blurry distance i felt myself displaced into depending on the section, my own uneasy yearning wistful misunderstanding spectatorship—where else can you have this?

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

My library didn't have the first novel in the Ravickian trilogy (The Event Factory) so as an experiment--I read book 2. Somehow it became extremely relevant and meta.

So it was an experiment on reading a book within a series while missing out of a portion series. I started the book, a bit confused trying to understand what catastrophe had struck Ravicka, and trying to understand this world and its rules.

Which is exactly the plot from the first book...

"A "linguist-traveler" arrives by plane to Ravicka...which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee... finds herself on the outside of every experience. Setting out to uncover the source of the city's erosion, she is beset by this other crisis—an ontological crisis—as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening.

[Jon Varner · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part was as compelling as Event Factory, flipping the perspective from an outsider trying to understand the city to an insider trying to explain it. Reminded me of Beckett.

The second part is a poetry reading and mostly unmemorable.

The third is a drunken after-party, told entirely through the dialog of an indeterminate number of people. Here the experiment fizzles out for me. Does it evoke the experience of catching a few meaningful phrases from the noise of drunken cross-talk? Yes. And perhaps that fits the overarching concept of the novels well. But it felt like a tedious bit to get past on the way to more interesting reading.

I'm looking forward to the next one. Nobody else I know writes quite like this.

[Cassie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You will guess imaginary forms to be divergent: mine does not resemble yours. But if I love the same city you love, our maps should be interchangeable"

As I stare out at Portland, OR in the aftermath of 2020, I am reading this knowing that I am perceiving Gladman's words of isolation and decay differently from how they were written. But as a reader, it may be natural for me to twist the story to match that backdrop. I think on some level, reading is translation and as Gladman translate her thoughts into this protagonist, I in turn translate those words into my own world. And I won't apologize for making my own map.

[fengyu · Rating 4 out of 5]

a book that you either read really quickly or really slowly, because i don't think there's any other way you "get" the book. sped through it partially for class, but partially because the vibes were immaculate in parts, but overall i still feel like i only got half of what Gladman was trying to do, and I want to revisit it with a fine-toothed comb. the conversations that end the book are masterful, i think. almost like poetry.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second book in the Ravickian series - we are introduced to a new narrator Luswage Amini. Amini is a native to Ravicka unlike the narrator in the first book who was only visiting. Because of this we get a more in depth look at the customs and changing climate of Ravickia. There is a lot discussion of wandering, translation, and architecture. Three topics I really enjoy exploring with Renee Gladman. I wish I’d found this book when I was working on my thesis but I’m happy to have found it now.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Builds on everything great about EVENT FACTORY, building out the city and its inhabitants while also deepening the questions of language and 'event' amongst a people and a species. The dream-logic of the first book is *slightly* more orderly, but in a way that actually increases the menace and unease of the reader. Damn, I liked this a whole lot.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The buildings, I have always loved." What I love most about Gladman's work is that the book sort of refuses to stand along as an object. It really does need to be read as an experience, which is striking since so often I read in order to download/consume the content. With The Ravickians I felt like there was a particular performance, of which I as a reader were part, every time I picked it up.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Communication and especially translation falter in ravicka. There is less Calvino here than in Ana Patova, which means less dreamy unreality but more unique voice. I especially liked the meandering conversation of the last third.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A disorienting reading experience, but pleasurably so, read in the midst of the mass disorientation that was life under quarantine during 2020. The first time in I can't remember how long that I read an entire novel in one sitting.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Building on the disorientation of Event Factory but from a Ravickian perspective rather than an outsider. Still unlike anything I have read before...I am not sure I fully understand what Gladman is doing but I am glad to be along for the ride. Onto book 3....

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Renee Gladman's Ravicka series continues with more brain-bending meditations on architecture and writing, along with a potently romantic depiction of connection, followed by a descent into progressively more arcane lecture notes (maybe?). Loved the first half!

[Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fully have no idea what’s happening during sections, but also enjoy reading it and the specific confusion I feel.