Riverwork

by Lisa Robertson

A lost river, a lost aunt, a found literary from the cult-favourite poet and author of The Baudelaire Fractal comes a glittering and erudite new novel of Paris.  

Some ruins are invisible. 

Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. For years, Lucy Frost has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris’s academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt’s youthful research on the Bièvre, mining the river’s documentary traces in the works of Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers a history of paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers – and laundries. 

She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river’s laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost.

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 brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers.

Genres: Fiction, France, Literary Fiction, Canada, Historical Fiction, Novels, Summer

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 5, 2026

Reviews

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riverwork felt like a book that quietly dripped into the gaps of my own thinking: slow, insistent sentences and Lucy’s ‘hag’ body kept offering me new ways to inhabit my own, and to see how women’s lives, work, and archives are submerged and re‑surfaced. I read it in a kind of lucid, feminist drift—next to kids watching TV, in parking lots, wandering the house, in a bath (and I never take baths). I felt like this novel prescribed a kind of wandering while reading. Robertson traces a vanished great‑aunt and the buried Bièvre River through old notebooks, dust, textile history, and the city’s plumbing. The pacing felt superb to me because it never forces urgency; instead it trusts that thought can meander and still arrive somewhere piercing. The writing is deeply soothing. It refuses the pressure to resolve—women disappear, rivers are covered, archives rot—and yet this minor, stubborn work: describing, copying, paying attention to the margins, is the riverwork of writing at its finest and most poignant (to me).

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel really lucky to have gone to Lisa Robertson’s book launch for Riverwork. The conversation shared between her and two professors was so engaging and hearing her read her own words was a privilege. I love the interwovenness of experience and thought in her work. The writing was beautiful. I feel like I’ll come back to this

[Remi Chevalier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't expect something that flirts between fiction and non-fiction so much for this one, so anti-narrative that it becomes almost essayistic at times. It's a super fragmented and polyphonic book where the narrator investigates the notes left by a great aunt and meditates on what it means to disappear, especially through the prism of the laundresses working on tanneries in a now disappeared river, but so much is braided around: her obsession with French authors, reflections about her aging body, tidbits of her work as a maid for a former archivist, and more tangents. It coats the entire book with a meditative layer, like an ambling mind going off route with no task on the agenda; it forces you to slow down to absorb these tangents and to be "contaminated" bits by bits by the narrator, her insomnia, her obsessions, her consciousness, and her failing quest to give a voice to vanished women of decades or centuries ago.

I found it at its strongest when it explores the collective disappearance of women and their labor, invisibilized and half-forgotten; but the most impatient parts of me found it a little inert, too comfortable in its haute-voltige intellectuality, and too dense in its references.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a book about the now buried Bièvre river in Paris, by a senior housecleaner chasing down the remaindered work of her great-aunt that disappeared years ago. But it's also about the act of writerly creation, textile, dust, seventeenth century laundresses, theft and everything in-between. It is a bookish fugue, a writerly bricolage, a meandering Sebald-esque novel that invites slow reading. As I was reading it, but before I had finished, I started again from the beginning, catching up with myself as I read to better sit with the words that are enigmatic and ordered in a way that I was unfamiliar with. It needed the luxurious stealing back of your time that Robertson advocates in the book itself to better understand it. In the end I found it unlike anything that I usually consume, but nonetheless strangely hypnotizing.

[Clara Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah, this is exactly what I’m looking for. Chose this book as my companion for my first trip to Paris and it was perfect. Ended up reading it so slowly to linger over every delicious sentence that it was read in Paris, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, New York City, and inbetween.

[Tia · Rating 5 out of 5]

DEMANDING but unlike anything else? Lisa is cooking in ways we can’t even imagine…

[Sophia Buck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lisa Robertson taught me how to savour words - I wish I kept an index whilst reading like Lucy does. Particularly enjoyable as many parts of this book are of great interest: dust, archives, lateness, style, textiles, histories of labour, and of bodies of water.

[Mic Jones · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

The most delightful wander through almost lost histories. Lisa’s prose is a river I don’t want to stop swimming inside of!

[Milanimal]

You'd expect a river book to meander but oof. A bloviating autofiction purporting to be a literary history of Parisian laundresses. Peak francophile delusion.

[Gracie Hime · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful and contemplative i needed something like this book. last chapter on death was really beautiful to me

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

fucking masterpiece ofc

[Colette Bernheim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devoured this in a day … can’t believe I had never read Lisa Robertson before this week I am forever changed

[Sarah Modene]

I picked up this book thinking it was something else. And then continued reading it because I'm stubborn and don't like leaving things unfinished. I'm glad I did. It's a certain pleasure to remember that some reading is slow by nature, and to let yourself float in passages that are driven by rememberences and query rather than plot. This is a book about bodies, memory, dust, legacy, fabrics, and ultimately, rivers too. A beautiful read worth the patience required.

[Jack Kast · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not fuck with this really. some parts were smart and i like the premise of unseen gendered labor and how that is reflected on our built environment but the main character i found really intolerable. show dont tell. so many smart aspects of this book like how she approaches archival research and other epistemological questions through the ecocrit feminist stuff very cohesive but i swear i would be reading this book and just be annoyed by the protagonist's personality. felt tokenizing and ivory towery

[Claire g · Rating 4 out of 5]

She may have done something I thought no one could do…….4 stars instead of5 for being a little affected. PS she is posting about Renee Gladman on instagram

[Talie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a story that flows from the present to the past; first person to talking through the aunt who was an archivist. The whole thing is anchored on the body of water in France that flows through the city and long ago was the main place ladies washed clothes. Fabric was dyed there and tanners used it as well. The story is a discussion about that working class central to it all but working to barely make ends and singing and making so much noise - it can seems like a party. This reads like a poem more than a story.

[Zoe]

hard to describe how meaningful this book was to me but i'll try later. in the form of a metafictional short story. it felt like lisa robertson was reading the insides of my brain and also the insides of my friends' brains and the trail mix we ate on the porch and also the lint on the ground. i feel like the girl in the baudelaire fractal like im convinced i wrote this book. but im not hubristic. i could never

[Lynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Holy whiplash, Batman. What was this? An incomprehensibly dense prose poem or historical non-fiction ? I rage-read this book, which I thought would be short enough to get through in a few hours. Ha ha on me. The dense writing and arcane vocabulary choices had me stopping every two sentences to look up words in my KOBO dictionary. I get that the author wants to slow the reader down, and takes more pleasure in the journey than the destination, but in my opinion, the author used language to obstruct meaning. I started skipping the most egregious passages indiscriminately and could not wait for this book to be over.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

It makes so much sense that Robertson is a poet. The diction in Riverwork is unparalleled, and the scenes and images finely crafted. The histories and setpieces were often enthralling, but I found some of the more contemplative chapters too slow. I liked the ruminations on erosion, accretion, dust, textiles, creating and destroying. I kept waiting for her to bring it all together, but maybe that was left to me.

[Zachary Stevenson · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

It lost half a star because the recondite vocabulary grew onerous at times, but otherwise I have only adulatory things to say about this novel. I was particularly taken with the narrator's love of archives and journals and clippings and reading regimens. The book also does a really nice job of depicting Paris as a palimpsest, a landscape with so many layers that even some of its rivers are buried.

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A river disappeared. Also, women. Also, poetry. I'm transfixed by the history of their valuelessness. (20)

The documents department had curated a display of Marcel Proust's drafts for Remembrance of Things Past. Called "The Fabrication of the Work," the exhibition showed the guts of the sprawling master-work, the notebooks, manuscripts, and typescripts, and several generations of corrected page proofs. In illuminated vitrines and horizontal display cases, attended by Fortuny garments on mannequins, the documents revealed Proust's unusual composition process. With successive deposits of fragments, supplementations, augmentations, re-transcriptions, interruptions, and displacements, on little pasted slips and clippings of paper, which covered over earlier attempts, the text was painstakingly built up over time. This layering activity began at the earliest stages of the book's composition, in notebooks, then the sediment of digressions continued, even intensifying in density, through all the stages of the writing, drafting, retyping, editing, and typesetting of the book. I had the sense of his vast novel remaining in chaotically fluid, unfixed movement for as long as possible, with the feeling of a swirling textile entanglement. (43-44)

Those other films routinely excise women's necessary workaday actions and gestures and their strict grace, as if a housebound choreography could carry no moral weight, as if its dramatic potential were absent, as if such forms of female work and all the styles of undertaking that work did not support the very duration of our lives. It is an astonishingly rigorous choice to place the maintenance actions at the core, as the substance of a domestic tragedy. (96)

I was and remain entirely against the docile imperatives of betterment. There are better rags and better ribbons but not better selves. (105)

Every contemporary account of women's laundry labour in the city stresses the inescapable intensity of the soundscape, both vocal and mechanical, produced by their work. My aunt noted that the city's attempts to banish its laundresses from the river were the first steps in the suppression of the river itself. Their voices went underground with the water. (193)

I'm unable to go further. My materials are scant and my capacities are both untrained and exhausted; I am bitterly disappointed and I weep. I weep at great length, my tears keep coming, I am the weeping woman of the ancient iconography, nothing new. I weep for my aunt, for Victorine Gorget, for the Archivist, for Édith Thomas, for every woman I have named in passing, for their disappearance, for my failure to show them as breathing persons or to attend to them through their deaths. I weep with their accumulated fatigue, which entered my body to be carried forward. I weep for the laundresses and the itinerant ash-sellers in the sixteenth-century streets, for the women bent under the weight of the cit's filth and its scorn, for the newts and the waterlilies and the mountains of oak bark, I weep for the weaver girl named Louisette who went to the drying meadow to kiss, for the passed-out drunk in his blue smock on the riverbank, and my tears keep coming and I will never write the book. (201)

If this failure is my given, what I possess and must work with, I am part of a lineage of those for whom appearance and agency do not align. The laundresses disappeared from the streets. The Bièvre went underground. The Paris Commune failed. Some twenty-five thousand insurgents were slaughtered on the streets in the month of May. After seventy-three days of worker co-governance beginning on March 18, 1871, the French army lined up the organizers and executed them by firing squad against a wall in the Père Lachaise cemetery, or shipped them to the penal colony of New Caledonia. But the fact of the existence of the seventy-three days, the fact of the transcribed speech of the women workers under police interrogation, the continuing presence of a sheaf of inadequate documents, some police photographs, the ongoing presence of the political desire for collective joy, the sound of the river beneath the sewer grates, these things continuously inaugurate transformations in the body of time, which floods upward into the regime of work, through our troubled bodies. We become the hailing and sensate documents. The detail of attention is ravenous. (202-203)

[Jack Kirchhoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first came across Lisa Robertson as a poet – back when I read a lot of poetry – and I was impressed by her intelligence and quirky, colourful use of language. Reading Riverwork, her second novel, is just as impressive, but it is not easy. At the beginning, especially, her prose is dense, complex and deeply thoughtful, but also needlessly (I thought) self-referential, often reminding me of the work of French cultural critics such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Houellebecq. You do not race through it. But the prose becomes less challenging, though still dense, complex and thoughtful, after 60 or so pages, and is well worth working through to get to the meat of the book. The narrator is Lucy Frost, a self-described "hag" in her 60s, Canadian-born but a long-time resident of Paris, where she cleans the homes of academics and intellectuals, especially the residence of an older woman she calls "the archivist," who is slowly, permanently engaged in sorting through the documents and correspondence of her life. Lucy herself is engaged in a smaller-scale archival task: Sorting and understanding the notebooks and photographs left behind by her great aunt Em, who disappeared years before and was never seen again. Em was engaged in the study of the river Bièvre, which used to flow through Paris carrying the stinking outflow of tanneries, dye shops and laundries, as well as huge quantities of human waste, until is was paved over in 1912. Lucy herself, a failed writer, is engaged in the study of Chateaubriand, Rousseau and a host of other French literati and filmmakers of the past (and present), as well as the life of the Archivist, the laundresses of the Bièvre and her own family in Canada. There is no plot, per se, and Robertson, through Lucy, makes it clear there will be no proper "story." But I still found myself compelled to read on, and I was glad I did, though I'm not sure I'd recommend the novel to most of my friends or family. As for me, I'm now going to read something simple and straightforward, though I'll probably be thinking about the Bièvre while I do it.

[Hkp · Rating 4 out of 5]

A heady, challenging blend of philosophy, poetry and prose. Robertson chooses some truly impenetrable chapter epigraphs, but the way I decided to read this was to pause (as she recommends) to savor the wise and astounding parts, and to let the rest wash through me.

And FTR, I have read the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation of that big 'ole book, all the way through. But I’m not quite enough to understand all of Robertson (this is a book to make a study of). So I’ll just drop some of my takeaways in quotes. Maybe the detritus will accumulate as intelligence.

"Sleep tastes or sips clandestinely but lustily from everything abandoned."

"The half-concealed river’s heroines were the laundress, the female insurgent, the factory weaver, the domestic servant, precisely the historical types that animated the Paris of my aunt."

"My aunt noted that the city’s attempts to banish its laundresses from the river were the fist steps in the suppression of the river itself. Their voices went underground with the river."

"Proust had learned a mode of textile composition from his maid, who had become his collaborator. His grand book was more mended or darned than written, each thread or cloth recuperated from an earlier garment before being woven through the gaps and abrasions in the text, and then again recut, resewn, its form as well as its surfaces changed by Celeste’s techniques."

"It was a time when the term schizophrenia was punitively attached to women outside or beyond supposed social use: menopause, depression, anger, poverty, lesbianism, and eccentricity were among its textbook traits."

"It’s a received truth that we can’t return to the past, but the logic of this statement rests on a linear conception of time."

"And yet, Chateaubriand said, whomsoever he loved was never buried, but continued to live in the air around him. Death, he said, does not destroy us by touching us; it only renders us invisible."

[Jamad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucy Frost is in her sixties, living in Paris and making a living cleaning other people’s homes. When she inherits the papers of her great-aunt Em, she becomes interested in Em’s unfinished research into the Bièvre, a river that once ran through Paris but has long since been buried beneath the city.

From there, Riverwork goes off in all sorts of directions. Lucy researches the river, the women who worked as laundresses along its banks, the Paris Commune, literature and the history of the city, while also thinking about ageing, work, memory and her own place in the world.

There isn’t a great deal of plot and anyone waiting for Lucy to discover what happened to Em, or for everything to come together in a satisfying conclusion, will be waiting a long time. But that is rather the point. This is a book about things that have disappeared and the difficulty of recovering them, whether that is a person, a river or the lives of women who have largely vanished from the historical record.

I found it thoughtful and quietly absorbing, particularly the connections between Lucy’s cleaning work and the largely invisible labour of the laundresses. I also liked the idea that the book Lucy thinks she has failed to write is, in effect, the book we have just read.

It probably won’t be for everyone. It is digressive, fragmentary and occasionally quite demanding, and you have to be prepared to follow it wherever Lucy’s thoughts happen to take her. I was happy to do so. An unusual and intelligent novel.

[Jen G · Rating 5 out of 5]

This won't be for everyone, but I adored it. Lucy Frost is a housecleaner by day and a writer by night, who relentlessly pursues her great-aunt's obsession with Paris' Bièvre river, which in this version of history disappeared underground in 1912 after centuries of diversion and pollution. Her great-aunt disappeared to France long ago and Lucy has inherited her archives, and becomes determined to continue the research her great-aunt started. The product is a philosophical treatise on the lost stories of women's labor, bringing back to life the silenced voices of the Bièvre's laundresses of centuries past. It's strange and meandering, but it had me underlining on almost every page. Thanks to the owner of Chicago's Exile in Bookville for recommending this book.

Favorite quotes:

"... lost time abruptly blooms, as in an archive the researcher can be infected by the spores of an ancient illness, long held captive among the decomposing papers, newly released by the dust of her riffling."

"Belated, insomniac, and underemployed, a reader and a weeper, a scoffer and a scrawler, a cleaner, a fibber, and a sipper, a doubter, a haunter of shame, I am a hag, yes; I am a riverologist."

"Memory is both topographic and cellular; the city existed in her body as it exists in mine."

"There's an absent river in every city."

[Elizabeth D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m giving this a 3.5 bumped up to a 4 because of the beautiful writing style. The story was intriguing and is told from the perspective of a young woman who works cleaning the apartment of an elderly Archivist while reading the journals of a disappeared great aunt who studied the history of a long lost river in Paris, the Bièvre.

Bursting with history and literary references this is the slowest I’ve ever read a book because the density of the language required careful reading. Every word mattered and many had to be researched to understand their full meaning. Thankfully the book is written in very short chapters so this allowed me to read it in bite sized pieces.

I particularly enjoyed how the story talks about the laundresses who worked along the river, the dyes that were used to colour fabrics, the different types of women who laboured there from sturdy Creole women to prostitutes to political activists. This was well researched.

As much as I loved the writing style I also found that made it harder to follow a plot. There was minimal interaction with other characters so this is more about the thoughts of the main character.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not the book the reviews said it would be. It is a book about a disappeared river in Paris, sure. But not really - “The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else.” And that ”something else” is Lucy Frost, a wannabe writer who is also 63 and a house cleaner who is mourning her long-disappeared great-aunt who knew a Paris she wishes she was part of. “Inside these rooms I wake up at 4:30 a.m. to construct sentences about waking up at 4:30 a.m.”

So what a the “work” of this book?

“Honestly, most of what gets called work is fuckery. To escape work or to escape into work or to escape sex to escape into lust, to make it work, to work at sex or to eroticize work, to be exhausted and to go on, to dally, to do all this outside credibility – the parts of working that are not working and the kinds of searching that are outside credibility, outside viability, are my topic.”

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dans ce texte, qui se veut délibérément « difficile », j’ai regretté la tonalité revancharde, voire victimaire, de ce « I », dont on retrouve les élans maniaques et jouissifs de Hazel Brown. Mais cette fois, le point d’honneur que Robertson met à caractériser ainsi son texte laisse peu de place à la lectrice pour dériver dans une écriture qui, pourtant, prétend inviter à l’errance. Débordante, la citation finit par lasser et engloutir la recherche de Lucy Frost derrière un rempart de savoir, emprisonnant la langue dans une jaculation narcissique.

[Amanda Rosso · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read in a long time, a prose so dense and pyrotechnical that forces you to read twice, thrice even, to stop on the page and concentrate. The reward is so fulfilling, the language so intense and vibrant, so lyrical that it becomes tridimensional. The page literally vibrates, sweats and reverberates with Robertson alliterations and iterations, like a banquet of meaning which is both a prayer and a riot. An incredible feat of genre bending intellectual and literary fireworks.

[Savannah Willson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautifully written and thought-provoking read. I loved how the story blended history, memory, and the hidden lives of women into something deeply moving. The writing is rich and immersive, and while it asks for your attention, it rewards you with so many memorable insights. A unique novel that stayed with me long after I finished it.

[Molly Guenther · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book, I feel like it’s pretty intellectual and I had to look up many many words and reread many many sentences but it was worth it and it was written beautifully and it’s about women and France. I heard about it on a book podcast and I’m so glad I decided to read it. I would like to read more by this Canadian author.