I Read Books: Getting By In Tligolian

 

Getting By In Tligolian by Roppotucha Greenberg

Jenny Scheffner is in Tligol, working in the hotel. People think she’s there as a student. She’s trying to learn Tligolian. It’s hard, the verbs have tenses that most languages don’t have.

Jenny Scheffner is in Tligol, and the city has a time warp in it. It used to be that travelling between layers meant walking and you could walk forever and not find the layer you wanted. Now there are trains and it’s possible to ride one to go to another layer.

Jenny Scheffner is in Tligol, and the city state is a dictatorship run by the Great Leaders. So there are things people don’t talk about, the trains and how they’re used, and the Great Leaders and the executions every month in the square. And this includes the language itself, they tell her not to learn it, and indeed she forgets it faster than she learns.

Jenny Scheffner is in Tligol and she fell in love with Sam. It was at his execution, and usually that would put an end to the relationship. But here there is a time warp, people don’t have the same relationship with death, or with life or with love. This is Tligol and she can ride a train to a layer where he’s still alive. A layer where he’s part of the Simplifiers, the group who want to change things. The group who will make an attack, and the Great Leaders will persecute with secret police and executions, and because this is Tligol the cause and effect merge into each other.

Jenny Scheffner is in Tligol and this novella is titled and chaptered as though it’s a language guide. Like many language guides it’s more of a tour guide, and like the best tour guides it’s a story, or history. On a tour through a city you’ll see things from different times, and I don’t want to push the metaphor too far, because this is a novella about Jenny and about Tligol and how she gets by, and learns and loves.

Jenny Scheffner is in Tligol and there’s a giant that fishes in the sea and the river and maybe the canal too. I don’t have an explanation for this, and maybe explanations are not really the point.

Read This: A novella of time, language, love and getting by, of absence and distance
Don’t Read This: The past – the dead – should remain decently buried
Full Disclosure: A recipe of mine appeared in Roppotucha’s book Cooking With Humans
Available To Buy: From Arachne Press