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Morelia
Chaplet #133
43 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
3 people are currently reading
213 people want to read
About the author
Renee Gladman
31 books246 followersRenee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Her most recent books are My Lesbian Novel (2024) and a reprint of her 2008 book TOAF (both also from Dorothy). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
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September 7, 2019Got this with Event Factory and prioritized them ahead of everything else in closet stocked with unread books after seeing a bookseller's thread about "stylistically and formally innovative novels by women published by small presses," saying that future academics will study this author's work. I hadn't heard of her, thought the descriptions seemed interesting, especially the shadowy world-building aspects, and excitedly ordered two books. Read this in one sitting on the train into work. It's essentially a short story. Somewhat similar to Event Factory in that it's a stranger in a strange land called Sepsia, which may be a Norwegian city. Unnamed narrator seems like she's trying to recover a sentence that starts with the mystery word "Bze," there's maybe a murder in the works, or that's just a dream impinging on what's really just tourism, maybe a European book tour. At one point someone asks "Are you African-American?" but didn't sense sociopolitical resonance. This is really a sort of mega-minimalism, to be really generous -- no plot or characterization of course (it's "experimental") but also neither language nor theme rise to fill the void. The language is unassuming, sometimes clipped, natural, at times overtly casual ("amazing" isn't the level of adjective expected in a book like this). Maybe it could be categorized as a prose non-poem? The title is probably a reference to Adolpho Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel, which I didn't quite love (click link for proof). Generally, this seemed like an oneiric travelogue. Oh. OK. Perfectly happy to spend $18 on a beautiful little hardcover and support a small press but won't rate since my reading experience was as quick and as empty as a shooting star not streaking across a non-existent sky. Momentarily intriguing but not much more for me.
December 16, 2019
This slim book is poetic, dreamlike, hypnotic at times and confusing quite a bit of the time.
This is my first reading of Renee Gladman. She says she wrote this ten years ago "at the end of a strange trip, where a rat crawled over my back in my sleep."
"The place I was going was neither Sespia nor "Ahnka," and that's why I didn't want to talk about it. Yet going there would address the problem of the sentence. No one told me this. It's just that ever since I saw the train station I knew what I had to do. These words are a quote. The leader of my country said them. Even now this is he talking. Even now. I would board the train as soon as its arrival became clear to me."
Library Loan
This is my first reading of Renee Gladman. She says she wrote this ten years ago "at the end of a strange trip, where a rat crawled over my back in my sleep."
"The place I was going was neither Sespia nor "Ahnka," and that's why I didn't want to talk about it. Yet going there would address the problem of the sentence. No one told me this. It's just that ever since I saw the train station I knew what I had to do. These words are a quote. The leader of my country said them. Even now this is he talking. Even now. I would board the train as soon as its arrival became clear to me."
Library Loan
October 21, 2019
Morelia makes enough sense and has enough of a plot to be readable, but it lacks emotion and is plagued by nonsensical sentences fused with confused isolation.
Part of me thinks I must be missing something here, but a greater part believes that there isn't anything there to miss.
What good is abstraction by itself? It appears to have no anchor.
Part of me thinks I must be missing something here, but a greater part believes that there isn't anything there to miss.
What good is abstraction by itself? It appears to have no anchor.
January 17, 2019
No one writes like Renee Gladman. To be dropped into Morelia, on a day like today, in a haze, with the word “Bze” both fitting uncomfortably in the mouth but also looming above, is a constant pleasure. To visit Morelia is a trip of language, mystery and intrigue. I remain in constant awe of Renee Gladman. What a gift she is.
—Jared, City Lights Bookstore
—Jared, City Lights Bookstore
October 5, 2025
A slim itty bitty little book by Renee Gladman. Her prose is as beautiful as ever. The book feels at once like a very stressful fever dream and also like the cloudy quality of waking up from sleep.
January 25, 2020
“I look at the book again and wonder if it could be our remedy, if I should go into it instead of out this door. Yet, 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.”
*
“You go, but going is like staying where you are, just with your eyes facing downward and your body still. I went. I came back. It was reading. Yet it wasn’t so much reading that I wanted to do. Or reading first, then something further, like walking. Could syntax become a city? It could, but I’d have to forget myself.”
*
“The world had grown quiet. I felt my real journey could now begin. I could now head out into this city, which I had changed by first treating it as a book. I wasn’t walking in the book anymore but I wasn’t not-walking in it either. That is another thing that happens when one has read: the world changes.”
*
4.5. not quite as utterly captivating as Event Factory but gold nonetheless.
*
“You go, but going is like staying where you are, just with your eyes facing downward and your body still. I went. I came back. It was reading. Yet it wasn’t so much reading that I wanted to do. Or reading first, then something further, like walking. Could syntax become a city? It could, but I’d have to forget myself.”
*
“The world had grown quiet. I felt my real journey could now begin. I could now head out into this city, which I had changed by first treating it as a book. I wasn’t walking in the book anymore but I wasn’t not-walking in it either. That is another thing that happens when one has read: the world changes.”
*
4.5. not quite as utterly captivating as Event Factory but gold nonetheless.
May 31, 2019
How often do you read a book that is entirely new? Characters, places, story, mystery, landscape, phrases, everything. I read this during a single cup of tea on a Friday morning off from work, which feels right.
October 10, 2020
no one writes sentences or prose like gladman. this book is a strange dream journey in which no word means what it should and yet meaning is woven all the same. a mystery about cities and sentences and unfoldings.
May 5, 2019
A brief and poetic language mystery with touches of noir and espionage novel nestled inside
July 1, 2021
There is not another writer alive operating on the level that Renee Gladman is persistently operating on.
November 7, 2022
I love a good book that plays with structure, form, and what it even means to have a plot. I adore Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, and I loved Gladman's own Event Factory. I guess what I'm saying is, I'm definitely the target audience for Morelia.
And yet...I don't think this slim novella really holds up in the way that the best of Gladman's work does. The plot, such as it is, seems to just peter out at the end, and although there is a dizzying number of recurring symbols, they don't seem to add up to much. It's Gladman, so there are lines of profound brilliance and beauty, which is why I'm giving it three stars. But where, say, Event Factory felt full of inchoate meaning, and conveyed the sense that it meant *something*, even if deciding what precisely that something was could be a whole lot of work, Morelia felt more like someone else trying to describe a dream that they're already in the process of forgetting.
It's a hard difference to explain. I guess maybe I'd say it's the difference between reading Eliot's Four Quartets, which are difficult and complex but reward every moment spent with them, and Pound's Cantos, which are a distinctly unrewarding game of literary Where's Waldo. Not that I want to imply that Gladman has any of Pound's other negative qualities (like his breathtaking antisemitism), but I didn't find Morelia a particularly engaging puzzle box -- certainly not enough of one to go back through the novella with a highlighter and try to disentangle the ways that the symbols intersect.
I have the rest of the Ravickians series at home, and I look forward to them greatly. Even the best artists don't hit a home run every single time out, and I remain an ardent fan of Gladman at her best. This one didn't do much for me though.
And yet...I don't think this slim novella really holds up in the way that the best of Gladman's work does. The plot, such as it is, seems to just peter out at the end, and although there is a dizzying number of recurring symbols, they don't seem to add up to much. It's Gladman, so there are lines of profound brilliance and beauty, which is why I'm giving it three stars. But where, say, Event Factory felt full of inchoate meaning, and conveyed the sense that it meant *something*, even if deciding what precisely that something was could be a whole lot of work, Morelia felt more like someone else trying to describe a dream that they're already in the process of forgetting.
It's a hard difference to explain. I guess maybe I'd say it's the difference between reading Eliot's Four Quartets, which are difficult and complex but reward every moment spent with them, and Pound's Cantos, which are a distinctly unrewarding game of literary Where's Waldo. Not that I want to imply that Gladman has any of Pound's other negative qualities (like his breathtaking antisemitism), but I didn't find Morelia a particularly engaging puzzle box -- certainly not enough of one to go back through the novella with a highlighter and try to disentangle the ways that the symbols intersect.
I have the rest of the Ravickians series at home, and I look forward to them greatly. Even the best artists don't hit a home run every single time out, and I remain an ardent fan of Gladman at her best. This one didn't do much for me though.
October 6, 2020
I ennjoyed it but I wasn't satisfied with the ending; but maybe that's the point... dun dun duuuhhhh
January 30, 2025
To enjoy I had to totally let go of any expectations or non-expectations of dreams/dream sequences. Then I did enjoy it!
July 15, 2025
Totally defamiliarized. Wake up one day and you're a city.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews