River Featured in The New Yorker
The New Yorker reviews Esther Kinsky’s River, translated from the German by Iain Galbraith, in its October 15 issue:
As she prepares to move, an unnamed German woman explores the River Lea and its surrounding territory, East London’s borderlands. “I made a home for myself by walking,” she says in this magnificent novel. Little happens, aside from this walking, but through serene, precise observations, the narrator’s world is transformed.
Reflection mingles with memories—of a childhood by the Rhine, a sojourn by the St. Lawrence River, a trip down the Ganges. As with the work of W. G. Sebald, Kinsky constructs the past through landscapes: for the woman, a river is a “water-script of histories.”
Read an excerpt from River at Literary Hub.
Esther Kinsky
Translated from the German by Iain Galbraith
A woman moves to a London suburb near the River Lea, without knowing quite why or for how long. Over a series of long, solitary walks she reminisces about the rivers she has encountered during her life, from the Rhine, her childhood river, to the Saint Lawrence, and a stream in Tel Aviv. Filled with poignancy and poetic observation, River is an ode to nature, edgelands, and the transience of all things human.