Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge

"In Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, it's the sentence that is alive and that is also a kind of architecture or landscape." -Amina Cain

"Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge is the third volume of Renee Gladman's magnificent, melancholy series about the city-state of Ravicka, or about the architectures of its absence. It is tempting to read the Ravickian books as an extended allegory-of architecture itself, perhaps, except that architecture is already half-allegorical, its every element raised to prefigure whatever meanings can make their way to them. If any can. In Ravicka, meanings-indeed most contact of any kind-remain in abeyance, building, in absentia, the constitutive negative spaces of the narrative. There is a plot; it lays out zones of sheer ambience. Experiences, of which there are many, unfold as a redolent lingering in the structures of immateriality, the radical realities of the insubstantial. Gladman is a philosopher of architecture, though not that of buildings. Rather, she thinks (and writes) the drifts, partitions, and immobilities of identity, affect, communication, the very possibility of being human. Profound, compelling-haunting, even-the story of Ravicka is astonishingly ours." (Lyn Hejinian)