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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.
'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
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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.
'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
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