Riverwork By Robertson, Lisa

A glittering and erudite new novel of Paris from the author of The Baudelaire Fractal. Lucy Frost is an insomniac cleaning woman in Paris. She writes in a notebook at night, documenting a series of interwoven disappearances from her adopted city. First, her great-aunt, who vanished in her old age, but in her youth researched the Bièvre River. The Bièvre River itself, buried in 1912, for centuries the core of Paris’s textile industries. And finally the river’s laundresses, among France’s earliest labour and ecological activists, many of them active in the Paris Commune of 1871.  When Lucy receives her great-aunt’s research papers, she picks up this abandoned project and prises the defunct river’s story from the literature that depicted its winding path. Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Hugo, and Rabelais give bearings to her voice. What arises in her nightwriting is a disquieting meditation on age, failure, and maintenance. 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 resurrects, in unforgettable prose, a forgotten Parisian river and the writers and workers it threaded together.