Hello Gentle Reader,
Summer is a youthful season.
Full of fallacies and vanities. Much like youth, it exists within flirtatious
and trembling light that is easily flighty and fair-weather oriented. This past
summer has been more scorched earth, then carefree and jubilant. The heat a
ferocious demon dog, oppressively burning down on the world. One of the
heatwaves in Europe this past summer was aptly named: Cerberus. In line with
the heat came the unstoppable and uncontrollable fires. Canada this year for
example, had its fair shares of blazes burning across the country, from the
semi-arid interior of British Columbia; into the prairies where the boreal
forests in Alberta and Saskatchewan are singed and blackened; the North West
Territories up in the Canadian Artic, continues to battle forest fires raving
through the tree line onto the artic mainline border; while out east, both
Ontario and Quebec, with their ancient hardwood forests have succumbed to a
christening through flame; and the watery Maritimes were not spared either,
with Nova Scotia seared in the summer heat. Else where in the world the story
was similar if not more brutal as the thermometer rose higher and higher. Maui
was devasted by a fire; while Greece's wildfire has been declared the largest
in the European Union's history. During this summer, many municipal regional
districts, counties, and parishes have declared agricultural disasters due to a
lack of precipitation and unrelenting heat; while further reports have declared
grasshoppers now ravaging what little crops are available for farmers to
salvage. As August wanes, the summers lion roar begins to recede, slowly, ever
so slowly.
Rivers have not been immune
from the heat and drought conditions either. Due to insufficient snowpacks,
river sources, reservoirs, and basins have experienced significant drops in
water levels. Municipal districts have instituted water conservation measures.
A recent walk amongst the river provided further evidence to these water
conservation efforts. Where the river usually full of blue ripples and white
cap waves, gushing forward unperturbed, ripping downstream with a single-minded
purpose; the currents lapping against the river banks with snake tongue
punctuality; is now, drowsily slinking by, its speed and spirit evaporated by
an unrelenting and unforgiving sun. River embankments—normally submerged—find
themselves dried up and exposed. Their clay like soil brittle and unstable. Fly
fishermen wade further and further out into the currents, as the water recedes
further and further away. Rain resides on everyone's lips, like an unanswered
prayer. The need for rain. The lack of rain. They mention the grass burning up,
leaves curling, flowers heat beaten. It's been a brutal summer. Standing on the
river banks, however, one begins to understand how the history of civilization
includes a history of water, be it river or coastline. How many cities of
sprung up along the banks of rivers? Countless. Rivers, though an aesthetically
pleasing fixture of the geography, are also utilitarian for logistics,
transportation, resource extraction, among a host of many other economic
purposes. Rivers have been the lifeblood of kingdoms; witnessed coronations and
civilizations rise; been the wellspring of empires. Rivers have also been the
great destroyers, overflowing and raging, immersing and baptizing cities with
unforgiving waters, drowning the unsuspecting, uninitiated, and innocent all
the same. Esther Kinsky once remarked that rivers are water scripts of history;
and considering how human civilization has happily settled alongside rivers,
they have inevitably become the watery scribes of our history.
Esther Kinsky is a German
language poet, novelist, and translator. Language is her material and form,
becoming the anvil, the metal, and the hammer. Kinsky has translated Henry
David Thoreau, Olga Tokarczuk, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. These three writers in
particular have a strong sense of place, an attachment to landscape. Be it the
still unspoiled forest and pond of Massachusetts. The esoteric and eccentric Kłodzko
Valley in Poland, a land of borders, folkloric traditions, and forgotten
saints. To the harsh north-east Kincardineshire (the Mearns) of Scotland in the
early 20th century, that rugged landscape of fertile farmland, but
not immune to the early century's hardships and social changes. Esther Kinsky
refutes the term nature writer or travel writer, seeing both forms as
exceptional niche literary formats, limited by prescribed structures and
subject materials. Having the background as both poet and translator, provides
Esther Kinsky an appreciative understanding of language, both its material and
mechanical functions, the dry engagement regarding all the grammatical rules;
but as a poet, Kinsky is able to explore the oceanic possibilities beyond the
dry scaffolding of grammar, and enrich language with depth and robust
character. Kinsky's literary language is meditative as it is expressive. Often
compared to the late great German writer WG Sebald, there is a Sebaldian
aesthetic to Esther Kinsky's work, a cerebral sense of wistfulness that gropes
through the vagueness of half-recollections and uncertain memory. While the
prose is in continual motion, a perpetual state of moving and wandering. In
languid prose a patchwork of memory, rumination, miscellaneous photographs,
fragments and recalled readings, pieces of writing from cinema or plays, a cut and paste blend of macro cultural essay and personal recollection. The form was
not unique to Sebald, having first germinated through the classic confessional
addict and essayist Thomas De Quincey, who understood the flexibility of the
essay as a literary form in its own right, capable of moving beyond the
conventionality of the novel; which was further expanded on by Thomas Bernhard,
whose plays and novels were expositions of manic and deranged psyches,
delivering breathless digressive monologues. Yet, Sebald gathered the dust and
fragments of these two writers, and much like Saturn, spun his own work
layering meditations of landscape, history and personal reflection into a form
that became quintessentially his own.
Where Esther Kinsky diverges
from WG Sebald, is the sense of personable interest and intimate observation of
other people within the landscape. Everyday people. Pedestrians and bystanders.
Where Sebald cared to meditate on gravitas of history and its spreading tendril
reach. Kinsky is more in tune and interested with the immediate, the present in
its wavering shifts between the corporeal present and the afterimage of
yesterday. Personal interactions remain detached and even distant. As the
populace is equal parts component of the landscape. In "River,"
Esther Kinsky traces a nomadic edgeland alongside the River Lea in east London.
A landscape of misfits, refugees, people in a state of continued transit.
Everything in the Lea Valley exists within a state of undefined impermanence,
as if locals have found themselves washed ashore or haphazardly abandoned. Kinsky's
narrator in "River," has in turn abandoned her own life within
London, for reasons not known, and in her own words:
"After many years I had excised myself from the life I had led in
town, just as one might cut a figure out of a landscape or group photo. Abashed
by the harm I had wreaked on the picture left behind, and unsure where the
cut-out might end up next, I lived a provisional existence. I did so in a place
where I knew none of my neighbours, where the street names, views, smells and
faces were all unfamiliar to me, in a cheaply appointed flat where I would be
able to lay my life aside."
In what can only be described
as a backwater suburb, the narrator has set aside her life, or at least its
material concerns. Passages of her flat describe a state of household still
packed, already aware its residence is limited. In this Kinsky's narrator is
not interested in settling, but instead drift by, and in turn undertakes a
period of exploration, observation, meditation, contemplation, with added
reminiscence regarding the relationship between landscape and inhabitants. The
descriptions are exceptionally luxurious, keen wandering eyes reveal further
and further treasures, like a magpie spy:
"Sometime before I left London I happened upon the King. I saw him
in the evening, in the turquoise twilight. He was standing at the park entrance
gazing east, where a deep, blue haze was already scending, while behind him the
sky was still aglow."
I originally wrote the King
off as an abandoned statue. An installation art piece, who like other
shipwrecked souls, had found itself washed up or discarded on the shores of the
River Lea. A figure and unofficial mascot of this urban backyard—despot and
forgotten.
"The King wore a magnificent headdress of stiff, brocaded cloths,
held together by a clasp adorned by feathers. The gold thread of the brocade
and the clasp itself still gleamed in the declining light. He was attired in a
short robe, with gold embroiled edgings shimmering around his neck and wrists.
The robe, which hung to his thighs, was bluey-green and fashioned from a taut,
heavy fabric with a woven feather pattern. His long black legs protruded
beneath the cloth. They were naked."
The King is yet very mortal
and alive, despite his silence, with only the ravens as his allies and company,
with their "sooty flutter and fading croaks." I found the
observations and descriptions of the orthodox Jewish community perhaps the most
fascinating. Their corralled existence within this no-man's-land. Their adherence
to both cultural and religious practices, creating an everyday sense of
liturgy, both enlivens the community, while fortifying themselves from it.
Though small rebellions happen.
"The park was empty at this hour. The observant Jewish women and
children who walked here during the afternoon had long since gone home, as had
the Hasidic boys, who I sometimes espied at lunchtime nervously giggling and
smoking behind the bushes. Their side-locks trembled when they were cold, and,
as I saw from the length of the red glow in front of each mouth in turn, they
drew too hurriedly on the cigarette they were passing around, while a hubbub of
voices and children's singing carried in waves from the windows of their school
beyond the park hedge, rising and falling in the wind."
[ . . . ]
"On Saturdays and holidays, when windows were open in warmer
weather, the sing-song of blessing could be heard on the street. There was the
clatter of china, children's voices, small groups of pious passing to and fro
between temple and home. In the evening the men stood in the glow of the street
lamps laughing, their faces relaxed, the feast behind them."
The River Lea traces its
course through a varied landscape before spilling into the Thames. Esther
Kinsky's narrator, however, reminisces of a variety of different rivers which
have touched and influenced her life, from the Rhine, to the Tisza, to the St.
Lawrence; but also, how landscape is shaped and defined by the rivers course, with
portraits of the weather and meteorological digressions can become quite
common. One of my favourite chapters: "XX. WIND," is a short surreal chapter
riddled with an offbeat humour and exceptional descriptions of one of the most
obstructive meteorological phenomena: wind, in all of its incarnations.
"River," is an
exceptional novel. Difficult to classify but an absolute pleasure to slip into
and swept away amongst the currents, discovering a tidal universe and singular
estuary script. Esther Kinsky's never shrinks or shirks its form. It continues
to trawl and drift alongside the unremarkable, the discarded, the otherwise
lost and beyond retrieval, which is suddenly reclaimed and remediated, fixated
into the landscape. Atmosphere is curated and conducted with careful attention
to detail. How light, weather, and season will dictate the scene and sentiment
of place, and how place permeates the person. "River," in turn provided
pause and reflection on my own childhood river, which I recall being forewarned
(like many other children) to steer clear from. It was not capricious but
unapologetically forceful, who unforgivingly drowned trespassers. As Kinsky's
narrator recalls the Rhine from her childhood:
"In primary school we had to learn sayings about Father Rhine, none
of which had anything to do with the river I had walked along in the years
before starting school. These sayings left an unpleasant aftertaste, which
became much bitterer one day when the bow wave of a huge barge dragged a child
my class of the end of a breakwater. The Rhine had revealed Himself to be a
nasty character. For days it seemed the river had taken our tongue and weighed
so heavily in our clothes we could barely move."
Readers should be forewarned,
however, that "River," is not a novel that skips like rocks across a
placid surface. It’s a slow burn. Deliberate in its delivery. Awash with
detailed observations that bubble, churn, and course with contemplation. There
is no narrative. Very little dialogue. It’s a novel of introspective
inwardness, which ultimately will submerge readers into its endless watery
depths. Surfacing and resurfacing for breath is a point of necessity, and it is
recommended that one reads at the pace of the novel, simmering and stewing
within its endless expanse. Esther Kinsky is that enviable writer, whose prose
is never dragged or burdened by its own luxuriousness, but is further enriched
by it, as it swells and floods; recedes and flows, all the while maintaining a
steady current and pace. Kinsky's prose is textured and layered, with a defined
colour palette and scheme providing portraits of both landscape and atmosphere,
revealing a new world through the veneer of an ever-observant narrator, who
sees the world afresh and anew, and in our own way wishes we had taken up our
own weather-beaten suitcase and umbrella and set off, to excise oneself from
their own life and be cast adrift be it windswept or lost in the tides.
Thank you For Reading Gentle
Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
M. Mary
