Bone River - Fluss der Träume (German Edition)

Foxes and badgers are crepuscular animals, awake and active twice a day, once in the hours between sunset and true darkness and again between the softening of night and the first rays of dawn.

The light at these times of day is crepuscular, too, moving as it does, ever so slowly, from one state of illumination to another. It is, in fact, the word most apt to describe the mechanics of River as a whole, as the novel sets about enacting an aesthetics of the crepuscular.

To be crepuscular, ultimately, is to dwell in a sort of transitory state, not because you are moving from one space to another, but because you linger in a circumscribed place while your environment changes around you. In one respect, River seems not to fit the bill: But the novel is not exactly a Sebaldian travelogue, in which a peripatetic narrator lyrically interweaves historical anecdotes, nor a work of psychogeography and cultural commentary in the mould of Iain Sinclair whom Kinsky translated into German.

Editorial Reviews

Although the narrator lives in a world that has long since moved on from the trauma of two global conflicts, her roving eye tends to snag on present-day traces of the destruction they caused, and she repeatedly encounters people displaced by them — people whose experiences of past injuries are ongoing, still burning, while a new era unfolds before their eyes. The characters belong to the twenty-first century, but the imagery that adorns them belongs to an earlier, almost monochromatic age. As if to reinforce this notion, the narrator recalls finding an old camera at a street market, an analog device that produces instant pictures.

Never mind the technological wonders of the digital era: It informs our view of what is other, forcing us to stop in our tracks and take in the opposite side. The river is dynamic, a bustling stage, in contrast with which the otherland opposite is integral to the fixed picture, a background painting which impresses itself on our memory.

With these words, the narrator offers an indirect articulation of her own aesthetic project. To hew to the river — the border — is to confine oneself to the space between two fixed absolutes, and although the narrator casts her observation in topographical terms, it also speaks to the way the Lea etches a border between two temporalities in River.

This is especially true when the narrator reaches the juncture between the Lea and Bow Creek, long ago the site of brickworks, slaughterhouses, and a porcelain factory. In River , the East London of the twenty-first century is anything but where and when it really is, although it takes this particular narrator, with her particular background and her piercing gaze, to see it as someplace elsewhere, elsewhen. Like the Lea itself, River is sometimes gracefully meandering, sometimes misshapen, sometimes lush and sometimes arid.

It is thick with meditative and descriptive passages, with swells of poetry and lyricism, but its most impressive sequences are, unexpectedly, those in which the narrator serves up the traditional pleasures of characterisation. In a way, they are the whirlpools and eddies in the river of the prose: River , then, is not only a novel about a person with an idiosyncratic experience of time, but a novel that structures time for its readers in a similarly distinct way.

There is nothing propulsive, compelling, or urgent about it. The narrator walks along the Lea for a day, then stops. She describes what she remembers of her voyages abroad. But the novel is not exactly a Sebaldian travelogue, in which a peripatetic narrator lyrically interweaves historical anecdotes, nor a work of psychogeography and cultural commentary in the mould of Iain Sinclair whom Kinsky translated into German.

Although the narrator lives in a world that has long since moved on from the trauma of two global conflicts, her roving eye tends to snag on present-day traces of the destruction they caused, and she repeatedly encounters people displaced by them — people whose experiences of past injuries are ongoing, still burning, while a new era unfolds before their eyes. The characters belong to the twenty-first century, but the imagery that adorns them belongs to an earlier, almost monochromatic age.

As if to reinforce this notion, the narrator recalls finding an old camera at a street market, an analog device that produces instant pictures. Never mind the technological wonders of the digital era: It informs our view of what is other, forcing us to stop in our tracks and take in the opposite side.

The river is dynamic, a bustling stage, in contrast with which the otherland opposite is integral to the fixed picture, a background painting which impresses itself on our memory. With these words, the narrator offers an indirect articulation of her own aesthetic project.

To hew to the river — the border — is to confine oneself to the space between two fixed absolutes, and although the narrator casts her observation in topographical terms, it also speaks to the way the Lea etches a border between two temporalities in River. This is especially true when the narrator reaches the juncture between the Lea and Bow Creek, long ago the site of brickworks, slaughterhouses, and a porcelain factory. In River , the East London of the twenty-first century is anything but where and when it really is, although it takes this particular narrator, with her particular background and her piercing gaze, to see it as someplace elsewhere, elsewhen.

Like the Lea itself, River is sometimes gracefully meandering, sometimes misshapen, sometimes lush and sometimes arid. It is thick with meditative and descriptive passages, with swells of poetry and lyricism, but its most impressive sequences are, unexpectedly, those in which the narrator serves up the traditional pleasures of characterisation. In a way, they are the whirlpools and eddies in the river of the prose: River , then, is not only a novel about a person with an idiosyncratic experience of time, but a novel that structures time for its readers in a similarly distinct way.

There is nothing propulsive, compelling, or urgent about it. The narrator walks along the Lea for a day, then stops. She describes what she remembers of her voyages abroad. Then she returns to the Lea at a later date, several weeks on, perhaps in a different season, and she continues her journey where she left off. Read a few pages, maybe a chapter, then set it aside. Return to it when the need moves you. Read a little more, then put it down again.