When there is so little left you do not give it all to one you fight to keep that thing in the mainstream. What could be worth that kind of sacrifice, literally ridding your house of its first step? My upbringing prevented me from asking though Hans read the accusation on my face. Since Amini’s books fall under A this is a loss for both her and the bookstore, one she wonders at: One example of a two-fold loss happens when Amini visits a local bookstore she likes only to discover that, in the alphabetized bookstore, all of section A is missing, allegedly sold to a collector. Architecture is a more readily apparent ongoing concern than loss in the book–characters are obsessed with the architecture of Ravicka, write about it, and define themselves against it–but the surface play of dwelling on the decaying infrastructure of Ravicka is less important than loss when it comes to an idea and an act revisited again and again in the text as story and as performance. I’ll get to “performance” in a second but first, as story, loss dominates both the day narrated by Amini and the writing in the poems presented in the novel’s second part.
And it’s not just different kinds of loss or absence experienced by Amini in the novel’s longest segment but loss as intimate as a loss of words that shutters a conversation between strangers or as widescreen as the violent destruction of architecture. This may sound somewhat disjointed or tough, especially the dialogue, and even given Gladman’s clear plain prose some of the dialogue is impossible to follow, but all of it is tied together through Gladman’s constant complex return to absence and loss. The second volume of a trilogy of novels exploring the crumbling, war-torn imaginary country of Ravicka, The Ravickians is less an exploration of the people and culture of Ravicka than it is a breathtaking book-length meditation on loss. The book moves through what it means to be lost, to get lost, to lose connection with your fellow humans and surroundings. This is all done in a brief novel divided into three parts: 1) a first person account of a day spent wandering by The Great Ravickian Novelist Luswege Amini 2) a poetry reading that same day given by Amini friend Zäoter Limici and 3) 52 pages in twelve sections of unascribed dialogue spoken during a night out in the broken down capitol city of Ravicka that includes Amini, Limici, other writer colleagues and some new characters not mentioned earlier in the text.
168 pages / $16 Buy from Dorothy Project or SPD
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