![]() ![]() It makes great, unpredictable company."-Adam Novy And while it's probably important for the critic to preserve the oddness of Gladman's project, it must be said that EVENT FACTORY, for all its challenging images and language, is cheeky and hilarious. The evening air is 'tender' the light is 'yellow' the morning is a 'greener yellow at the start of the day but every moment growing golden.' Everything the narrator tries to do ends in failure, but experience somehow happens anyway. "There are passages in EVENT FACTORY which are furiously beautiful. EVENT FACTORY is the first in a trilogy of novels Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign "other" place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all. ![]() ![]() 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. ![]() Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. A "linguist-traveler" arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Event Factory by Renee Gladman (Dorothy a Publishing Project, paperback) ![]()
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