Renee Gladman, _The Ravickians_

 THE NARRATOR OF the previous novel in Gladman's series, Event Factory, is a student of Ravickian language and culture making her/their first visit to Ravicka, anxious to impress, to avoid any faux pas, to convey somehow her/their genuine love and engagement with Ravicka. The visit does not go altogether well, though. She/they never finds exactly the right note, although many try to be helpful, like the poet Zàoter Limici. Just as the narrator is about to leave, she finds a copy of the most Ravickian of Ravickian novels, Luswage Amini's Matlatli Doc, and even accidentally passes by Amini in the street, but doesn't say a word. The connection does not  happen, and the narrator goes home.

"The Great Ravickian Novelist," the first section of the series' second volume, The Ravickians, is narrated by Amini herself. We immediately notice a bristling isolation, a denial that the essentially Ravickian is knowable in any but its own terms. "If, for example, you are reading these lines in French or German, Basharac or English, these are not the lines you are reading. Rather, these are not the lines I wrote." Only in Ravickian can one know the Ravickian.

At the same time, something is amiss in Ravicka. The narrator of Event Factory had a vague sense of this throughout that novel, and she/they seems to have been right in her intuitions, for Amini and her friends are anxious about the future. Amini is looking forward to a lecture later in the evening by Zàoter Limici, who may have some insights into the problem. His lecture is the novel's second part ("Please Welcome Zàoter Limici"), and it seems to be an esoteric performance, proceeding mainly by quotation and allusion, but it also may be about opening up, letting things in, as if Ravicka has been too isolated. "I have gone on too long, my brothers," he apologizes. "And have brought the outside in with me. Your faces confirm it."

The third and final section, "Grand Horizontals," is a freewheeling, somewhat tipsy post-lecture conversation among who knows  how many people, likely including not only Amini and Limici but also Ana Patova, Amini's long-lost love. There is a lot of talk of bridges--might there be some possibility of exchange or communication between the Ravickian and non-Ravickian after all? Would an influx of otherness be exactly what will restore Ravicka to health?

The next installment is titled Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, so I feel there is reason for hope.