To the River is Olivia Laing's book about a week she spent walking the length of the River Ouse in Sussex. It is steeped in the rhythms of walking, history, bloodshed and modernity. Laing's stops and starts and storytelling are engaging and lyrical. She brings her readers to her side, points out and then backs away, letting the story of the place, of the observers and observed take center stage.
The stories she tells are quite frequently awful ones about wars and despair and unchecked eccentricity. Many lives have been lived and lost on the banks of this and every other river in England. The River Ouse is the one that Virginia Woolf drowned in, though, and that story never leaves the book, or our awareness. Reading this is not unlike walking in the world on an uncomfortable day - exhilarhating and exhausting. Like all the best travel is.
This one I found in used, because travel writing is one of my sets of shelves, and finding travel writing written by women is not for the lazy. Finding travel writing by women of color is for the focused and determined and shouldn't be as difficult as it is. However. This is what comes of institutionalized racism, sexism and the desperation of publishing houses to keep selling the same kinds of books to their reliable customer bases in an age of predation and global e-tailers. Bastards.
My goodness, she's good, though. Olivia Laing writes beautifully of the river, of walking, of the strangely euphoric melancholy of walking along the river, of the histories of the places on its banks and fields and with an understanding of the capacity of understanding to effect real change in people's lives.
And yet, this book is catagorized as nature writing and she herself as a nature writer. Her book The Lonely City, which purports to be about being lonely in a city and finding her way through art, gets put in Art history and biography. Her book A Trip to Echo Springs, though, that ended up in Belle Lettres, which makes sense as it is about writers and drinking.
So, even though To the River reads like many of the great travel narratives I've come across, it is shunted off to Nature or to memoir, because women don't write about travel, or about travelling or about the history of places to which they have traveled. Women write about themselves. They write about how their stories intersect with the world outside of them, but mostly they write about themselves. Particularly white women. Women of color must write about themselves in the context of struggles they have encountered on account of being women of color in a world that is built to benefit white men.
Laing's book is more than confessional. Her walks are exhausting, informative, despairing and beautiful. You leave her book tired, feeling like you have to wash unearned road dust off of your face and perhaps find a good pair of shoes for feet that are not sore enough for what you've just imagined and read. Her specificity about nature feeds the illusion. Her thorough research and storytelling feed the illusion. The book is a wonder.
Read it with a glass of water and some hummus and pita.
#40days40books list
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