October 2, 2017
Gladman inverts 1984 in her inventive fourth novel set in the dystopian future country of Ravicka (after Ana Patrova Crosses a Bridge); it is narrated by a mid-level bureaucrat called the Comptroller, who is referred to as both a man and a woman in the text. Unlike George Orwell’s Winston Smith, the Comptroller has drunk the Kool-Aid, and the familiar way he/she tosses off place names and bureaucratic expressions unique to those living in Ravicka add both drollery and authenticity. The Comptroller is in a Groundhog Day–like loop of trying to find missing houses, including his/her own, then falling asleep, losing blocks of time, and then having to start over. His/her friend Hematois, with whom the Comptroller is staying, proposes gaining deeper perspective by visiting “the crest of cit Saut,” the highest point in the country. The Comptroller is inexplicably confident that he/she can get back to the heart of the mystery and solve it by following Hematois’s suggestion. The solution to the mystery has a meta and theoretical cast that might frustrate some readers, but those in tune with Gladman’s philosophical underpinnings from the get-go (and especially those who have read previous Ravicka books) will be satisfied.
September 15, 2017
In her fourth slim novel about the surreal and complicated city of Ravicka, Gladman (Prose Architectures, 2017, etc.) unfurls the meditative story of a city official searching for a lost house.Jakobi, the Comptroller of Ravicka, is searching for a house that is somehow lost in order to confirm the location of a house that is invisible. Despite all Jakobi's measurements and calculations, No. 96 remains unfindable, disrupting Jakobi's life and self-esteem. The lost house becomes a frustrating wound on Jakobi's sense of reality, an aberration even for an official who monitors the locations of buildings in a city where the migration of buildings is an accepted fact. Jakobi's search feels both urgent and meandering. The tantalizing mystery of how and why a building might be lost seems to be less of an engine for plot and more of a doorway constructed to allow the reader to pass through to a contemplation of the surreal concepts and images of the Ravickian world. Narrative logic and momentum give way to a spacious creation of ideas, sometimes expressed in vivid images and sometimes in didactic explanation of imagined facts. Jakobi is sometimes a man and sometimes a woman; an old acquaintance seizes control of the narration and then gets folded up and put away in a pocket; an unnamed person who lives in the invisible No. 32 claims the entire second part of the novel to reflect on the history of Ravicka's invisible architecture. These fantastical details add up in a way that might have more in common with performance or installation art than with the expectations brought on by the assumption of a story. A reader would be wise to enter Ravicka without hungering to know what happens next but looking forward to a perambulation through a gallery of beautiful images.
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