Renee Gladman, _Houses of Ravicka_

 I MISUNDERSTOOD THE sequence of the Ravicka books and so read this one, the fourth, right after reading the first (Event Factory), skipping the second and third, but I ended by enjoying it even more than I did the first, so I suppose no harm was done. I certainly intend to get to the second and third when I can.

Houses in Ravicka have...hmm, what to call them, spiritual partner houses? That is, for every house there is another house to which it corresponds, in some mysterious, never made explicit way. The Comptroller, our narrator for most of Houses of Ravicka, is embarrassed to mortification by his, or her (the Comptroller's gender sometimes switches) inability to locate Number 32, the partner of Number 96. The Comptroller is an i-dotting, t-crossing sort of person, a minder of p's and q's, the author of Regulating the Book of Regulations, and her/his bureaucratic discomfiture was both easy to sympathize with and entertaining.

The beauty of these books, for me, is their ability to hybridize the sci-fi-as-anthropology world-building of Delany or LeGuin with the intoxicating indeterminacy of Beckett or Lispector. Even though the last part of the novel is narrated by the person in 32, we never learn why or how the house became imperceptible to the Comptroller, just as we never quite settle on the Comptroller's gender identity. That seems exactly as it should be--the reward of the novel is not in the resolving of mysteries but in sentences like this one: 

Seeing my coordinate for the first time and knowing it was my coordinate was like being in two separate novels--at the beginning of one, the end of the other--and having those two novels write toward one another but as if with an obstacle between them, such as a massive eruption in the landscape that you must walk around in order to progress, and it'll take decades to do this.