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.
A collection of labyrinthine acrobatic lexical maneuvers delivered with the unadulterated confidence of the unhinged ... Frost repeatedly, explicitly, rejects narrative containment, preferring instead a lavish layering of philosophical reverie ... Robertson is capable of syntactic complexity but more interested in finding fresh ways to press words into use ... This is an extremely specific strain of fun, but we are definitely having it ... Having taken drudgery as its subject, Riverwork very much feels like play.
In Robertson’s hand, the sentence—much like a river, or ribbon, or raw-edged seam on silk—just won’t sit still. Its movement is deviant; its pronouns, mood-ringed and fluid ... This is a novel that is also an inventory—the massive readerly pleasure of it residing in Robertson’s always surprising and elated handling of language ... The primary pleasure for a reader of Robertson is always in thinking about reading ... 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 ... It is impossible to summarize a Lisa Robertson sentence because the meaning of a Lisa Robertson sentence is made in the time it takes you to read it, hear it, feel it in your aching bones, stutter any one of its words. The meaning of a Lisa Robertson sentence is the sentence.
To read Robertson is to witness a ventriloquism act ... Robertson intricately folds her many influences into every aspect of her work, sometimes in the form of their exact words. Riverwork is no exception ... Riverwork collapses time and individual experience. We are drowning, it seems to suggest, in torrents of information, memories, absences, desires, tears. We will all, always, drown in history ... Art is what awakens us to our drowning ... Masterful.
