Event Factory by Renee Gladman

I had a dilemma about entering.  My accent was pretty good at that point; I knew I would be understood.  But there was a gesture I was to make upon entering a place that was already peopled, something between "hello," "sorry," and "congratulations I'm here," and I could not remember what it was.  As subtly as I could, I bent here and there trying to jog my memory: was I to do a shake, a roundoff?  I kept thinking, "How great it would be to enter."  If only traveling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing or dancing--I think I would be absolutely global by now.  In Ravicka, I was barely urban.  A child approached me and asked if I were sleepy.  Why it was this question that recalled the missing gesture, I shall never know.  But there it was: you folded your body as though you were taking a bow with your legs spread far apart, and then, after holding that posture for several seconds (depending on your age) you brought your legs together quickly.  I stepped inside the door; the patrons turned toward me; I performed and was right.

An unnamed narrator arrives by plane in the yellow town of Ravicka.  She's studied the language, she knows about the culture, and yet the city is strange and forbidding: it's difficult to tell what people's intentions are, and every social circumstance demands not just the right word but a complicated gesture, from entering a shop to having sex.  Sorry, I'm not quite making this sound as strange as it really is: the city, and the people in it, are like something out a Fellini film, where human intention and conversation are aestheticized, robbed of sense.  Ravicka is a maze, a yellow--whatever that word means when applied to a whole city--maze, beset by some kind of nameless crisis.  Underground, a group of rebellious dissenters speak a language made only of air.

Renee Gladman's Event Factory is something like a hyperexperimental version of Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, about the satisfactions and bewilderments of travel.  The nameless narrator wants badly to be integrated into the fabric of Ravicka--she even spends a few days working as the concierge in her hotel, when the original concierge disappears--but Ravicka remains essentially unknowable and inaccessible.  The experimental aspects of Event Factory put us in her place; the novel, too is difficult to break into.  The language looks like something familiar, but is unsettlingly strange in ways that are difficult to explain entirely.

I enjoyed the weirdness of Event Factory, but I'm not sure what else there is to say about it.  I get the central idea of it, I think; experimental art is always in some respect about alienation, and this particular alienation is the alienation of being in a new place, or perhaps any kind of place at all.  But taking it apart and trying to put it into regular English words seems beside the point; the words might work, but what's the right gesture to make it communicable?