What I Am Reading: "Morelia" by Renee Gladman

This tiny (43 page) novella was a gift; I asked a friend to pick a Renee Gladman book out for me after I read about her in n+1. She was advertised as writing short, dreamlike fiction, almost prose poems that often focused on architecture or the built environment; not dissimilar to the description that led me to Austerlitz, actually.

Gladman’s running series is about the inhabitants of one such strange city called Ravicka. This book isn’t in that series. This is about a woman who starts the book in some kind of lucid dreaming scenario, alternating between being locked in a series of hotel rooms and remembering her falling out with a crime figure that she used to work for. It isn’t clear if either of these scenarios are the real world. The only constant is that when she “wakes up” alone in the hotel rooms, there is always a sentence written on a piece of paper taped to the window, beginning with the word “Bze,” which she continuously remembers having come across in disparate contexts.

After she escapes her hotel confinement in a flash of violence, she realizes that the sentence, which she cannot read, must be instructions to get to a location, as it has a number and what she takes for an address, “stiasadern.” Attempting to find this number (or another number that came to her through the haze of memory as the beginning of someone’s phone number) takes her out into the city of Sespia. She follows a strange street (“S. Ausbinder”) that gets narrow and more hemmed-in by buildings as she goes; unlike an earlier hotel escape there are no people for her to interact with on the streets, other than a woman in a plaza who seems to know the phrases from the paper have some kind of negative connotation, and suddenly asks the narrator if she is an African-American (as Gladman is). Finally, she ends up in a train station, and after conversing with her cousin, who is there, takes a train.

I like this sort of extended dream-sequence format. For the most part the story, despite its dream illogic, is fairly easy to follow. That definitely could have gone the other way. There was only the occasional track-back needed in the liminal spaces where you need to sort out her situation. The prose is fun:

I would board the train as soon as its arrival became clear to me. But where should I stand until this happened? And how would I know it was my train and not all these other ones heading in the wrong direction? I’d given up the board and decided just to ask someone. This station, which I had thought state-of-the-art, was seeming more and more provincial. There weren’t any people to service you; they’d been replaced by water fountains. Everything was about staring perpetually at a shuffling board until you fell over with a headache, among other maladies. I refused to travel under such circumstances, and said this to the water fountain in charge, getting no response, of course. I bent over to drink from it, to prove mind over matter, but was quickly admonished by a passing couple. The water tasted like grapefruit. (p. 40)

The cityscape is indeed part of the story, as advertised; the narrator is reluctant to find the address without first understanding the rest of the sentence, as only through the extended directions will she arrive where she needs to be. She picks the first street she comes to, on the logic that, after leaving the last hotel building, there is one way with a sign and one way without, and when you are totally lost it is better to go with the area marked on the sign, so you can start to establish some frame of reference. In leaving the hotel itself, she must first choose to cross the threshold, “an inside and an outside with nothing in between,” (p. 23) overcome the option of sending herself into a familiar and recurring book, but:

…having dressed so concisely for moving freely about the city, could I now, all of a sudden, switch to a burrowing-in persona, because that’s what you need to “enter” a book. To get “in you need to dig and get skinny and lose your voice; but you don’t need to go outside, which is just the repetition of everything. The clock said go.” (p. 24)

So basically the book was fine, I might look into her other books at something with a little more anchoring, like one of the Ravicka books or The Activist, which is about domestic guerillas. I’m sure an English major or a poetry aficionado could get a lot more out of it than my half-cultured self, but I’ve always liked prose poetry when I’ve encountered it, and I found it to be a relaxing little read.