Post 10 "Event Factory"

   The narrator is a linguist who comes to a hotel in a foreign country on a journey. She appears unfocused at first, actually throughout. She tells a bunch of events and sometimes there's no reflection. It tells what happens to her while she's in this foreign place. At one point the linguist wants to discover something secretive and sets off to discover it. The character of Dar is introduced as a companion to the narrator. Dar is not the same nationality and they have to communicate with Ravikian words. The jumping of events doesn't stop here, even on adventure with Dar, the narrator continues to drop anecdotes without reflection. I can't recall why Dar left but she did. Then the narrator was alone for awhile. She did end up finding what she wanted, which was the secret Downtown. It seemed to leave her feeling unsatisfied. She then chose a new goal which was to find a book by a well known author and then met that author.
    The blur at the end comes when the narrator has the book but is back at the hotel with her friends. The next moment she's getting on a plane to leave. One motif that reappears about four times is the salsa dancer's advice about movement. Perhaps the message or main point of the book was not the details of the events, but the events themselves. Maybe the movement from event to event was the purpose of the narrator's journey. She didn't seem so fulfilled at the end with having seen the Downtown or having read the book. The salsa dancer's advice reappeared perhaps because that's the thing she could bring back home with her. It seemed to have more impact on her time there than discovering Downtown and reading the book.

Her feelings throughout about events:
"That feeling which attacks even the most seasoned travelers derailed our motivation...What am I doing here?" page 53
"The salsa dancer had said "You can't do it without the movement," and there I was over the past several weeks trying to do just that." page 40
"Standing in full view of my prize I realized that there had been nothing in particular I wanted with it, other than proof that it was there." page 83