Notes

Event Factory was a bewildering book in which nothing actually seemed to happen. The narrator spent her time in the city attempting to discover its truth by uncovering whatever crisis its citizens seem unwilling to discuss. The core of the book as I understood it revolved around the difficulty of connecting with others. The narrator is a linguist and fluent in the language of the city, but struggles constantly to communicate adequately with everyone she meets. Though she becomes attached to quite a few people over the course of the book, none of them seem to return her feelings enough to stay with her for long; she constantly finds herself abandoned or wandering away from her companions in search of answers they cannot or will not give her. And though the narrator has a goal and enough agency to work toward that goal, most of the things that happen to her are out of her control. She wakes up in strange places, meets people who pull her along on adventures, or finds herself thwarted in her attempts to find Ravicka's truth by her own inability to communicate. In these ways, the book struck me as being a surrealist parody of real life. Sometimes we are the passive object, not the active subject, of action; sometimes we struggle to communicate with each other in a way that has any meaning. This isn't the kind of book I normally read, and in fact I can't even truthfully say I liked Event Factory. But it was an easy read, at least, and a thought-provoking one.