The Ravickians

Book excerpt: The second volume of Gladman's acclaimed Ravicka trilogy continues the author's profound and fantastical meditation on translation, architecture, 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.