‘A commune of the impossible’

Riverwork
by Lisa Robertson

Toronto: Coach House Books, 2026
$24.95 / 9781552455173

Reviewed by Michael Greenstein

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Lisa Robertson’s first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal (2020), lays the groundwork for her second, Riverwork. Earlier imagery of a girl’s stains and painterly folds enter the fabric of the later fiction, as colourful protagonist Hazel Brown gives way to clear, cool narrator Lucy Frost. A visual artist and poet, Robertson is responsible for the cover design of her first novel, where charcoal fractal lines smoke across the title. Vancouver artist Kathy Slade has designed the jacket for Riverwork: a blue stained and folded river inks across the cover and is embossed to add a telling, tactile dimension that runs through the book.

In Paris, Lucy is engaged in archival research, carrying on the work of her disappeared great-aunt who had spent part of her life researching the Bièvre river. This river flowed alongside the Seine when laundresses worked to clean garments in it until its disappearance after centuries of industrial pollution. With multiple epigraphs from learned texts, Robertson traces the history of these unknown washerwomen through pensive sentences and paragraphs—Proustian remembrances of things past, lost, and regained. Indeed, all the authors of these epigraphs comprise a dramatis personae, demonstrating overlapping genres from poetry to philosophy in sentences that course through cities and centuries.

The first epigraph belongs to Chateaubriand: “The ruins of which I speak were alive and constantly changing,” much like Lucy’s ruined river which comes alive and morphs in minds. A second epigraph is taken from the Goncourt Brothers: “It’s my origin, I’m telling you, yes, it’s this slutty little river that baptized me. In her I started to fish for what I am, what I feel, what I represent.” With her French inflection Robertson navigates the source and mouth of the Bièvre, as well as numerous Gallic quotations in intertextual flow and countercurrents. Like Anne Michaels’ lost rivers, Robertson’s hidden Parisian river is overshadowed by the Seine, but the novel uncovers its history and mystery through the lens of Lucy’s phenomenology or Roland Barthes’ “ceremony of the imagination.” 

Lucy “steals” her great-aunt’s documents or “grimy notebooks,” much as she purloins Proust’s long atmospheric sentences and cadences. After a lengthy description of index cards and fragments of transcriptions in folders, she concludes: “A stain of madder-red dye from long, patched velvet curtains.” This dye belongs to the historical works of the Gobelins factory, while stain alludes to the work of laundresses who conflicted with male dyers. Her aunt’s name is Em—a pre-fix and pre-text surrounded by “embellished,” “embroidered,” and embossed before she leaves Toronto “to embark for Paris.” This lost riverologist appears in My Great-Aunt, a grey taunt and migrating aunt who travels between Canadian prairies and Parisian capital with her “errant thought beneath the caked-on skin of grey dust.” Stains, dust, and ash sediment the Bièvre.

In empathy with the laundresses of her research, Lucy becomes a cleaning lady for a ninety-six-year-old woman, known only as the “Archivist.” Also, in this Archivist’s employ is Kémi, a dark-skinned male student who serves as her nurse and who refers to Lucy as “cousin” in a surrogate family of fragments. With him she investigates Karl Marx alongside watermarks and blood stains. By turns lyrical and philosophical, Lucy copies her aunt’s words—“a conduit, a culvert, a fiction, nothing; the ribboning city under the city.” A flâneur of arcades, arrondissements, and subterranean urban space, she collages French thinkers from Montaigne to Rousseau: “Baudelaire, who suffered everything and was seized by a stroke on the sill of a Baroque confessional … died at forty-six.” Her great-aunt speaks in her, for Robertson is a ventriloquist of belatedness penetrating literary forebears and empathizing with underpaid laundresses in riverine sentences and reverie.

Sounds of words and their etymology form part of her archive, as she associates Rousseau with ruisseau (stream) in her river reverie, “which proceeds by detour and diversion rather than intention, a dérive.” Here we enter the postmodern musings of Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida. Like the Bièvre, the metro has its own subterranean flow, and Lucy finds an empty stained seat: “I sat on the stain and I thought about Proust.” This image spreads in her petites pensées—“a little think on a stain”—that includes a certain “femme history,” ceremony, and irony between young girl and older hag: “This is so for hags and for girls.” Her thoughts spread to insomnia, pauses, reading Wuthering Heights in a grain silo, and myriad other experiences and emotions. Lucy’s childhood in her Canadian barn with its silage turns to Parisian sillage in adult life. Her river of tears is both readerly and writerly, resting in ruins and architectural caprice.

In her bildungsroman she clutches a copy of Roland Barthes’ Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse, cleans apartments, and languishes in garrets. Her apartment sensitizes her to sounds where she can overhear invisible traces; it resembles the anatomy of the inner ear with its vestibule. Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space seeps through these pages, “trembling like a lark in sun,” or “the fragile echoing call of a thrush.” Her mind flits from Montaigne to Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, and Proust in fragments and auras. Her narrative gathers dust from Virginia Woolf’s prose to Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of domestic decomposition, as she composes her own amalgam of mood or tone between edges and folds of rags and other accoutrements. She examines Hannah Arendt’s “respectful tone of ironic bemusement,” itself a form of baroque mood, cadence, and empathy. She also studies Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk and is shocked that in all his wandering about Paris he never mentions the Bièvre. 

A longtime Vancouver resident (currently based in southwest France), Robertson takes up the cause of the “suppressed scarlet river” and lists in some detail the names of the women Communards of 1871. Riverwork is a history of disappeared locution and a locational archive—a “perception of migrating traces of their voices within my voice.” Lucy augments garments: “I slip on the old robe”—a gesture of covering, falling, and recovering in her pausing and stumbling process. Giving voice to all the disappeared laundresses on the river, she cleanses history. To approach her aunt’s thought she must unlearn how to read—advice given to her reader. The Bièvre contains “sediments of baroque accumulation.” After immersing herself in Poussin’s Deluge in the Louvre, she closes her diluvial narrative with “I want a commune of the impossible” in the community of Communards and thoughtful epigraphs from a full chorus. Overflowing and magically disappearing, Robertson’s indelible river meets Mark Twain’s Mississippi and James Joyce’s Liffey.

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke) and the author of Third Solitudes, as well as some 200 essays and reviews on Victorian, Canadian, and Jewish literature. [Editor’s note: Michael Greenstein reviewed recent books by Jill Yonit Goldberg, Barbara Black, Rhea Tregebov for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster