River

(Paperback)

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Description

'After many years I had excised myself from the life I had led in town, just as one might cut a figure out of a landscape or group photo. Abashed by the harm I had wreaked on the picture left behind, and unsure where the cut-out might end up next, I lived a provisional existence. I did so in a place where I knew none of my neighbours, where the street names, views, smells and faces were all unfamiliar to me, in a cheaply appointed flat where I would be able to lay my life aside for a while.'

In River, a woman moves to a London suburb for reasons that are unclear. She takes long, solitary walks by the River Lea, observing and describing her surroundings and the unusual characters she encounters. Over the course of these wanderings she amasses a collection of found objects and photographs and is drawn into reminiscences of the different rivers which haunted the various stages of her life, from the Rhine, where she grew up, to the Saint Lawrence, the Hooghly, and the banks of the Oder.

Written in language that is as precise as it is limpid, River is a remarkable novel, full of poignant images and poetic observations, an ode to nature, edgelands, and the transience of all things human.

'Magnificent... As with the work of W. G. Sebald, Kinsky constructs the past through landscapes: for the woman, a river is a water-script of histories.' - New Yorker

Reviews

'Esther Kinsky's unnamed narrator observes and remembers, piling up beautiful, silt-like layers of description and memory until it becomes difficult to know which is which. .... This is a book to relish for its precise descriptions of landscape and weather, for its interest in the detritus of other people's lives that we routinely overlook, and for its international reach as well as its localised intensities, all wonderfully evoked in Iain Galbraith's translation.' - Jonathan Gibbs, The Guardian

'There's a timeless quality to River ... the names of the four seasons and the four elements ("air" is most frequently associated with storms; the season is usually autumn or winter) are intoned over and over, and the book's structure is openly cyclical. How much is fact and how much is pure fiction It hardly matters. River exists in a hinterland between personal and universal strands of truth ... Esther Kinsky has produced a minor-key masterpiece. Iain Galbraith's English translation is note-perfect, and River could well be one of the best new translations of 2018.' - Jacob Silkstone, Asymptote

Author Bio

Esther Kinsky grew up by the river Rhine and lived in London for twelve years. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, four novels (Summer Resort, Banatsko, River, Grove) numerous essays on language, poetry and translation and three children's books. She has translated many notable English (John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, Iain Sinclair) and Polish (Joanna Bator, Miron Biaoszewski, Magdalena Tulli) authors into German. Both River and Grove won numerous literary prizes in Germany.