Couldn't get into this one at this time.

If this is supposed to be dystopian fiction then it's excessively tedious and set inside the head of a mind-numbingly inane woman. If this is supposed to be miserablist essays then it's full of uninteresting hackneyed mendacity. By page 44 Kinsky is desperately claiming she managed to find an area of the Lee Navigation in London full of "Bullet holes from random gunfights". Lol, no. Imagine resorting to a falsehood that obvious and banal. I tried reading on but "I struggled to ward off the rubbish that kept blowing into my face".

In conclusion: a ridiculous self-indulgent floater of a book crapped out by rote.

(P.S. Unlike the reviewer below, I am "a poetry person" and this ain't it.) ( )

An unnamed woman arrives in an east London neighbourhood. She has come from distant lands but is familiar with the practices and provenance of the observant (and unobservant) Jews of this locale. Her own Jewish roots trace back to Poland but are mixed and mingled and she seems always somewhat at sea, as though, like many of these immigrants and refugees, she too had lost her home. She appears to be in mourning for the loss of her father and many of her memories are of him taking her to see rivers in different countries. But it is clear that she must find her own way now, which she does through following the many branches of rivers joining the Thames near London. She intersperses these journeys with memories of other journeys and other rivers in very different lands.

Esther Kinsky’s writing is both rich and melancholic. She offers dense paragraphs of description full of lists and eddies of sub-clauses. Her protagonist is an observer, primarily, so it is fitting that she both makes and seeks out photographs of her river haunts. Only rarely does she engage directly with the locals. So the prose is uninterrupted by dialogue, which makes it seem dense and, sometimes, monotonous. However, I think this muffled experience is something Kinsky specifically intends to achieve. It’s as though our reading needs to share this character’s own muffled (perhaps grief-laden) experience of life.

Always, no matter what the protagonist’s apparent interest in a chapter, there is a river. And she is always either approaching it or moving away from it, only rarely ever crossing any river. It’s as though her life is caught on the muddy banks of a tidal river, neither fully immersed nor ever fully out of the muck. And so two years pass and then she packs her belongings and moves back to eastern Europe. Has there been a narrative arc, or is she now much as she ever was? I think she does change but that change is subtle, not fully escaping whatever brought her to this point, but nonetheless willing to see the world in the light of a new dawn.

It takes a bit of fortitude to get through, but if you are up for it, it is well worth reading. ( )