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A lost river, a lost aunt, a found literary life: from the cult-favourite poet and author of The Baudelaire Fractal comes a glittering and erudite new novel of Paris.
Some ruins are invisible.
Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. For years, Lucy Frost has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris’s academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt’s youthful research on the Bièvre, mining the river’s documentary traces in the works of Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers a history of industry: paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers – and laundries.
She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river’s laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost.
Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of ageing and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers.
'If you already like any combination of Lisa Robertson or Chantal Akerman or François-René de Chateaubriand, you’re going to enjoy reading this book. If this is the first you’ve heard of any of the above, here is your chance to dip a toe into these waters that run so often unseen.' – Dawn MacDonald, The Seaboard Review of Books
'Robertson’s writing engages in a shrewd, at times caustic, examination of history and culture, and produces linkages between labour and capital, gender and class, and leisure and industry.' – Jean Marc Ah-Sen, The Globe & Mail
'Robertson’s work is precisely about the negative space around authorship. Or, to state it otherwise, all that we might find when we renounce our attachment to that individual construct of genius.' – Alex Tan, The Baffler
'[A] collection of labyrinthine acrobatic lexical maneuvers delivered with the unadulterated confidence of the unhinged…This is an extremely specific strain of fun, but we are definitely having it.' – Kerry Howley, The New York Times
'Robertson is a ventriloquist of belatedness penetrating literary forebears and empathizing with underpaid laundresses in riverine sentences and reverie.' – Michael Greenstein, The British Columbia Review
'There are sentences in Riverwork that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. They are now sewn onto the lining of my feminism, my metaphysics, and my most inner vocabulary.' – Audrey Wollen, Toronto Review
'Riverwork is a hymn to slowness and close reading, unknowability, imperfection, wobbly human labor, false starts, and angry love; it is a scream against the increasingly omnipresent, automatically generated offers to synopsize, or synthesize, and therefore to strangle. It opts for excess.' – Claire Foster, Bookforum
'To read Robertson is to witness a ventriloquism act ... Riverwork is no exception.' – Emily Mernin, Literary Review of Canada
'[F]ascinating…The author brings her poetic gift to this particularly nuanced look into her protagonist’s world and thoughts.' – Library Journal
'[A]n incantatory tale of water and dust, textiles and insomnia, the slipperiness of history, the shape-shifting of art and literature, the mysteries of dreams and memories, and the knottiness of time ... Robertson's mesmerizing portrait of a learned and reflective mind shimmers with striking perceptions, murmurs with loss, and whirls with ardor and moxie.' – Donna Seaman, Booklist
'Lisa Robertson is one of those writers who seems to invent a new genre with each book.' – Marko Gluhaich, Frieze
'[I]n her latest novel, Riverwork, Lisa Robertson shifts attention to an arcane river that flowed through Paris until the beginning of the twentieth century: the Bièvre ... Her novel is concerned both with histories that have been disappeared and with writing and reading as practices that daylight strata of labor, culture, and deep time.' – Editor's Choice, BOMB Magazine
‘Riverwork gives the sense of having been written hundreds of years ago while also anticipating the literature of the next century. The opportunity to sell a book like this is the reason I opened a bookstore.’ – James Crossley, Leviathan Bookstore
‘Riverwork is an alluvial novel, richly layered with textures of meaning, memory, and sentences that glimmer in the light.’ – Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books
‘A deeply introspective and lyrical account of a woman's search for her great aunt through her writings about the Bièvre river in Paris. She seeks to add to her lost aunt's research of this lost river while also reading, writing, cleaning houses and wandering Paris in ways similar to many thinkers who have come before. Robertson weaves these Parisian ghosts – Proust, Baudelaire, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, etc. – in throughout the novel, creating the feeling of a shared discourse spanning centuries.’ – Laurel Kane, White Whale Bookstore
‘Inject this into my bleeding veins. Lisa Robertson's follow-up to the underground (is it still subterranean? -- am I hopeful that is? do I dare hope that it might not be?) classic, The Baudelaire Fractal, is nothing short of stunning. My most memorable reading, or at least remembered by me, are those works that mention or invoke, in secret or as shouts, other books. They have a way of exposing the genealogical trails, with all the resulting dead ends and diversions, that help compile a library worth its weight in words. Riverwork is as a modern examplar of such a work, and I will treasure it by following where it may yet lead.’ – Brad Johnson, East Bay Booksellers
Praise for The Baudelaire Fractal:
‘Robertson’s work offers a philosophical defence of the girl, a celebration of the menopausal dandy, a speculative release from the constraints of gender, and a portrait of reading as drifting.’ – Andrea Brady, London Review of Books
‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s already a classic.’ – Anne Boyer
‘A difficult work of ideas, by turns enlightening and arcane, part autobiographical narrative, part literary theory, Robertson’s debut novel, for those interested in possibilities of fiction, is not to be missed.’ – Publishers Weekly
‘Robertson, with feminist wit, a dash of kink, and a generous brain, has written an urtext that tenders there can be, in fact, or in fiction, no such thing. Hers is a boon for readers and writers, now and in the future.’ – Bookforum
‘Things happen in the novel but none so much as the sentences themselves, they are the events; each sentence invites mediation, pause, excitement.’ – Allison Grimaldi-Donahue, BOMB Magazine
‘A new Lisa Robertson book is both a public event and a private kind of bacchanal.’ – Los Angeles Review of Books
Additional Praise for the Author:
'Here as in six earlier glittering books, Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy … Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt … Though she wields … language expertly, even beautifully, she also shows an almost pagan delight in embodiment.' – The New York Times on Magenta Soul Whip
'Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.' – The Village Voice on Magenta Soul Whip
‘Lisa Robertson’s Boat works against the certainties much poetry strives to achieve.’ – Dan Beachy-Quick, Poetry Foundation