Riverwork - by Lisa Robertson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet, essayist, and novelist who lives in France. Born in Toronto in 1961, she was a long-time resident of Vancouver. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently Boat (2022), and two books of essays, Nilling (2012) and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003). Her 2021 book Anemones: A Simone Weil Project (If I Can't Dance, Amsterdam), an annotated translation of Weil's 1942 essay on the troubadour poets and the Cathar heresy, is the most recent outcome of wide rime, her ongoing study of medieval troubadour culture and poetics. She has been a visiting poet and professor at Princeton University, University of Cambridge, U East Anglia, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Piet Zwart Institute, Simon Fraser University, American University of Paris, Naropa, and California College of the Arts. In 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2018 the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in New York awarded her the inaugural C. D. Wright Award in Poetry. Her novel The Baudelaire Fractal was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General's Award for Fiction and has been published in French, Swedish, and Turkish translations. A second novel, Riverwork, is forthcoming from Coach House Books.