River

July 16, 2018
Rivers provide settings for this meditative, melancholy novel from Kinsky (Summer Resort) in which an unnamed narrator’s observations of flora and fauna, immigrants, outsiders, and displaced persons, are presented like photographs for review and reflection. The novel begins after the narrator abandons her London job to move into a neighborhood at the city’s edge. Unsure where she will go next, she walks along marshes and inlets, takes pictures (photographs accompany the text), collects small objects, and recalls the past: childhood in postwar Germany; motherhood in Canada; witness to calm or flooding waters in Poland, Hungary, Croatia, India, and Israel. Like her neighbors—a Jewish greengrocer, a Pakistani who runs an internet café, a Croat who runs a shop for Bosnian refugees, an exiled African King—the narrator feels her foreignness. Kinsky’s lyrical prose includes descriptions of barges, houseboats, tree stumps, an office full of cubbyholes, and a street filled with religious celebrants. Chronology and story line remain elusive in a sometimes disjointed, sometimes gloomy narrative, as Kinsky focuses not on connecting events but on capturing relationships: between photography and memory, disaster and loss, water and yearning for home.