A hypnotic hymn to our desire to act on the world, change it for the better, and the infuriating impossibility in the modern world of pinpointing where the problem lies and who bears the blame.

In Porto, a group of people have gathered who all feel that things are terribly wrong, the whole world is being slowly, relentlessly gentrified, and Porto along with it. Something must be done. But what?

Half of the group are rootless emigrés, the other half locals. They speak in cafés, they smoke in the rain. In the world we live in now, it is impossible to grasp, to put your finger on exactly where the problem lies, who is to blame. The concepts seem to slip through one’s fingers and dissolve into a shapeless, ungraspable web of global post-capitalist interconnections. Outside, the rain continues to fall and fall.

Finally, the group settle on a plan. Something has to be done. An enemy is identified and the group’s revolutionary desires are now to be turned to action. But things go disastrously wrong.

THE RAIN is a masterfully executed stylistic experiment in which Grigoriev’s nameless narrator never speaks. In the spaces between the related speech of others, a diffuse identity begins to emerge, the identity of a narrator we’ve come to associate with Grigoriev’s fiction. A homeless wanderer with Russian roots, a European consciousness, a sharp and lucid gaze and a queasy feeling in his stomach as he tries to take in the world and describe it in language as beautiful, melancholy and vivid as the rain.

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