Books are no substitute for experience, and yet for most of us certain places are either out of reach or too expensive to inhabit for more than a tourist’s week or two; we nourish and enhance our geographic obsessions by reading. Paris is one of the great destinations not only of the traveler but of the reader. And even Parisians have been known to escape to a Paris that exists only in books: Baudelaire, mourning the destruction of the medieval city by Baron Haussmann’s modernization projects, invoked Virgil’s image of enslaved Andromache weeping a small river (the Simois) over a doll-size replica of lost Troy in his poem “Le Cygne.” André Breton, in Nadja and Mad Love, conjured his occult project of Surrealism from the city’s chance encounters, not least between the present and the dreamy past, its flea markets and arcana. Walter Benjamin’s unfinished manuscript Das Passagen-Werk was going to be a study of the city’s vanished nineteenth-century shopping arcades: his notes are mainly composed of quotations from literature. Like the murmur of an underground stream (as Auden might say), the subtextual message is always I’m too late.

Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork draws on all these influences, and many more, to evoke overlapping Parises that chime with one another like a ghostly carillon. It may be one of the best travel experiences you could have of the city these days: the narrator, Lucy Frost, is unlikely to stand in your way with a selfie stick, and you will not be rained on or forced to flee heat dome–generated wildfires. The story concerns two disappearances: that of Lucy’s great-aunt Em in 1969 and that of the River Bièvre (a tributary of the Seine) in 1912. Both survive only in textual references and disjecta membra: Lucy has inherited her great-aunt’s scholarly papers, including (shades of Benjamin) all her notes toward a grand history of the Bièvre and its industries, its tanners and laundresses. Lucy herself may be at risk of disappearance; she is a sixty-three-year-old house cleaner—a self-described “hag”—paid in cash, an autodidact with insomnia brooding alone in her flat, soothing her aching feet with salt baths, when she isn’t retracing the steps of her great-aunt, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or François-René de Chateaubriand through her adopted city. (Like Robertson herself, Lucy has emigrated from Toronto.) We meet none of her friends or associates other than the Archivist, the ninety-six-year-old woman whose apartment she cleans, and the Archivist’s nurse, Kémi, a young Senegalese grad student in queer studies.

The Archivist is so called because she is retired from a position at the Archives Nationales, one of the most important archives in the world: its oldest document is a land grant written on papyrus and issued by the Merovingian king Clothar II in AD 625. “The universe, she says, from the depth of her shawls and her yarns and her cardigans in her Louis XVI bergère chair,—is a product of dust. She coughs dry and low.” It is Lucy’s job to dispose of this dust, as in a Grimm fairy tale: “You will remove all of it. You will use linen rags lightly dampened with vinegar. You will first scent the vinegar with cedar oil in order to discourage the mites. The dust will return and you will remove it again.”

Such is our behind-the-scenes glimpse of the Paris home of our dreams: heavy candlesticks and waxed parquet and “mandalic” carpets, Venetian chandeliers, glassed bookcases and massive wardrobes and threadbare upholstered chairs with “undulant forms.” A home stuffed with antique legacies: a theater of “reduced means,” “erudite propriety in decline,” “everything feels hyphenated,” “a fraying grammar: taste in its last agonies.” It suits our narrator, who feels her own time is running out. And the Archivist is, of course, a living relic troubling the present, a kind of vestal virgin of book culture: “She lived in those constrained, darkened rooms with the dramatized autonomy of an island dweller who defends the borders of a lapsed ideal…. Lapsed ideals were my fondest weakness.”

The indignities of age are multiplied by the old city’s crumbling steps, curving staircases, sharp cobblestones, unpredictable showers. On her way home after an exhausting day of work, Lucy spots the only open seat in the metro car and realizes that it’s vacant because of the labia-shaped menstrual stain on it. She, the cleaner, sits on it anyway, ignoring the puckered mouths of her fellow passengers. Robertson turns the scene into a dialectical tour de force, as Lucy reckons with the visual sign and its oracular significance:

I continued to cover the communicating stain with its frilled little pinky-brown edges and slutty insouciance, and it was my own stain, my own youth I was covering with my tiredness, and my youth was speaking to me directly now with no shyness and no trepidation by means of my contact with its bled-out mark.

Lucy’s first visit to Paris was as a young woman in 1984, following in her aunt’s footsteps. She is now approaching her aunt’s age when she disappeared. She is intermittently preoccupied with the passing of erotic desire and her own desirability, but there has been a fair exchange: youth has become an archive of experience. The menstrual stain is but an ornament.

Lucy may not have many friends in the city, but proper names abound: her companions include Hannah Arendt and Thomas Carlyle, Aby Warburg and Honoré Daumier, Jeanne Dielman (from the eponymous Chantal Akerman film), Simone Weil and Jean Genet, and above all Rousseau (whose Reveries of a Solitary Walker is an abiding inspiration), Proust (Lucy Frost’s name is a slant rhyme for his), and Chateaubriand, his companion Juliette Récamier, and her friend Germaine de Staël. Lucy reads ten pages of Memoirs from Beyond the Grave every morning: “Chateaubriand says we are nothing but time.” “Birds will speak the last human words, says Chateaubriand. He is a lover of crows…. He says only style survives.” Style is a major preoccupation of Riverwork—no surprise there, as we are in Paris, and successive styles (or, as Lucy adds at one point, “attitudes”) make their eras legible, like the Archivist’s bèrgere chairs. Style is heaped on top of style, style overwrites or overpaints style, style is clawed back from obsolescence. All of Paris is a palimpsest, and the possibility of peeling off the layers to see what’s beneath is part of its allure.

Peeling off the layers: the metaphor suggests nothing so much as an undressing, which is a feat in a culture of overcoats, waistcoats, hats, gloves, scarves, chemises, crinolines. Lucy Frost is an aficionado not only of books but of fabrics and sartorial detail: “As well as wimples and kerchiefs, there were fichus, coifs, escoffions, gorgets, lappets, hoods, caps, snoods, templers, barbettes, cauls, and liripipes.” (Those are just the head coverings.) “I…was quite bursting with such outmoded knowledge,” Lucy muses, but while the vocabulary is technically outmoded, it is indispensable to her style. On her way to an exhibition on Proust’s manuscripts at the Bibliothèque National Francois-Mitterand, she traces the path of the buried Bièvre riverbed and arrives at an exhibition called “The Fabrication of the Work.” Amid the

notebooks, manuscripts, and typescripts, and several generations of corrected page proofs…mannequins stood wearing cut-silk embossed velvet Venetian coats and dresses made by Fortuny, so that one could scrutinize the turn of a cuff, the revelation of a decorative lining, a sumptuous dyestuff, a rare surface treatment, amid the textural proliferation.

The logic of this metaphor—that a writer is like a garment maker—is embedded in our etymologies: line and linen, text and textile, fabric and fabrication. The “thread” of an argument can become the “embroidery” of a falsehood. It was in fact Proust’s housekeeper, Céleste Albaret,

who had shown him the patching technique he used to fabricate his book…. Eventually she became, among her other domestic tasks, Proust’s secretary, typing out the scrawled drafts he produced during his sleepless nights.

“‘Pinning here and there a supplementary sheet, I’ll build my book,’ Proust wrote, ‘I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress.’”

The analogy of writing to tailoring loops back to the significance of the Bièvre as the site of the Gobelins tapestry factory, as well as of tanners, dyers, and laundresses. It was an industrious place:

It wound in a forked path behind the university, toward the Jardin des Plantes, where it emptied into the Seine. It was a river of tanning and parchment making, hence of books and their glue and their bindings. It was a river of prostitutes, sex, and students. It was on the banks of a diversion of this river in his student lodgings, now the rue du Bièvre, that Dante began to write his Divine Comedy, beginning with Hell. Sometimes called simply the Little River, sometimes the Gobelins River, after the district’s tapestry workshops, sometimes the creek of Saint Marcel, after the fifth-century monk and his nearby chapel, it was a river of paper and papermills. It was a crimson river of dye and piss and offal, and it stank.

While Lucy’s great-aunt studied at the Sorbonne in the late 1920s, her search for the actual river “would curve back to the ornamented vaulting of the library reading room.” That is, it would be a mistake to search for it in real life; most of Rousseau’s ten walks in Reveries “had no maps, no discernible routes; what he called ‘promenades’ were often indulgent ruminations or even rants.”

This category error is repeated forward and backward in time. In 1788, Lucy tells us, Chateaubriand set out to find the Parisian address given by François de Bassompierre in his 1665 Mémoires, where the distinguished courtier tried to meet a laundress for a tryst and ended up running for his life. Chateaubriand found the passage so gripping (and the green skirt of the bygone laundress so memorable) that he tried to verify the merely written. Lucy tries it too, and the address brings her to a hotel that she realizes used to be a nightclub called Bains Douches, where she went dancing as a young woman in the 1980s. As this dawns on her, she trips, falls, and rips her stocking. She confesses her humiliation to Kémi, who has further information: the Bains Douches used to be the Bains Guerbois, the brothel Proust frequented. Moreover, he notices, the chain of coincidence involving memory and stumbling echoes Proust’s stumbling on a cobblestone in Venice, which triggered his own sense memories. The convolutions of time ripple out into unintended consequences, echoes, rhymes.

Lisa Robertson, born in 1961 in Toronto, was for many years a prominent poet, arts writer, and avant-garde community presence in Vancouver before moving to France, where she has lived for around two decades. The author of some thirty works—hard to count precisely, since many of them are chapbooks and other furtive publications—she is, even by poets’ standards, an obsessive brooder and revisionist of her own work, adding new discoveries to her personal canon and intermittently translating medieval troubadour poets into ribald English. Robertson’s readers will recognize her ongoing preoccupations with eros, aesthetics (she’s a self-proclaimed “she-dandy”), the pastoral, flaneurism, and feminism. Above all, her work emerges from encounters with favorite authors: it is writing out of and about reading itself, and what it means to submit to, be influenced by, inhabited by, possessed by another’s mind. Her poems are conceived as book-length “projects,” meaning they function a bit like essays, and her essays, like those collected in Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003), breach the boundaries of the prose poem. Her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal, was published in 2020, and Riverwork is only her second.

Lucy might be speaking for Robertson when she remarks:

It was possible that I had once written poetry and that I now read philosophy in exact avoidance of stories and their moral logics…. The story of gender. The story of betterment. The story of family. The love story. The story of origins. I disliked the collapse of irreducible living into myth.

But Riverwork tells a great story, and it is Robertson’s most accessible book yet, written in a personal voice that achieves flights of erudition punctuated by rewarding (and very French) aphorisms. The lengthy epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter may discourage some readers; at times they are dully academic. Robertson explains in an interview:

Quite a lot of that reading consisted of somewhat obscure material that people don’t necessarily read these days. So the epigraphs became a way to bring various historical texts into the present. I could pop in a quote by Carlyle on the history of aprons, say, or Barthes on Chateaubriand, or Hazlitt on style, then when elsewhere in the book I mention Carlyle or Chateaubriand or Hazlitt, the epigraph anchors the reference and adds dimension…. I was changing them around until the last minute. It was like a collage work.

It must be said that the epigraphs can be conveniently skimmed without missing a trick. Collage, that great twentieth-century form, can be exhausting to read and militates against the flow implied by the titular metaphor.

Riverwork is, in one respect, a rewriting of À la recherche du temps perdu: at the end of the story, the narrator has a revelation about the great work she must create, which is the book that you, reader, hold in your hands. In another respect it is an attempt to synthesize French literature from Montaigne to Rousseau to Chateaubriand to Baudelaire to Proust to Barthes, where the experimental, memoiristic, and lyrical essay (literally meaning “to try”) is the vehicle of the story, and the meander (either river or road) is the operating metaphor. And in yet another respect it is a full-throated cry: “A river disappeared. Also, women. Also, poetry. I’m transfixed by the history of their valuelessness.”

The human interest at the heart of Lucy Frost’s story is of course the disappearance of her great-aunt Em, who comes in and out of Lucy’s thoughts as she makes her way around Paris. It’s not until late in the book that we get a fuller picture of what happened and of the pathos that defined her thwarted life. Em was, at first, the woman from the grubby middle-class family who got away: initially to Toronto for her bachelor’s degree, then to Paris to study French literature. The stock market crash in 1929 put an end to her freedom; her family called her back, and she went to work teaching French in “prairie schools,” moving from place to place, drinking more, steadily losing hope and then her job. She became in middle age a ward of her brother, Lucy’s grandfather, and when news of France’s occupation by the Nazis reached her, she lost her senses and was committed to the Queen Street psychiatric hospital in Toronto: “Schizophrenia, read the report. I would call it political grief.”

It’s not such a stretch. Em’s research into the River Bièvre led to interest in the laundresses, which led to interest in women’s labor and eventually women’s participation in labor movements:

In 1828, laundresses of the Chaillot laundry enterprise on the Bièvre initiated the first collective labour actions in France, striking against the tanning and dyeing industries’ polluting chemical use, and for higher pay. The laundresses’ strikes continued through the nineteenth century. There were further laundry strikes in 1848, 1869, 1880, 1905, 1911, and 1924.

The laundresses turned activists and members of the 1871 Paris Commune are lovingly named and described, including Amélie (or Émilie) Dumesnil, Blanche Lefebvre, Marie André, Victorine Gorget (“La Grande Créole”), Marie-Jeanne Moussu—all arrested, imprisoned, interrogated. This was the culmination of penury, overwork, and overpolicing. “Indeed, for centuries the trades of seamstress, lingère, and laundress were considered synonymous with prostitution; otherwise these working women were destitute.” The Bièvre was filthy, and sometimes it ran scarlet from the Gobelins dyers. The scarlet women, scrubbers of cloth in a public river, were nevertheless purveyors of style:

The Communard Louise Michel’s skirt was riddled with bullet holes…. Nathalie Lemel, armed with a pistol, wore an old thigh-length, open-front, eighteenth-century-style black jacket, decorated at the breast with a red fabric rosette…. Elisabeth Dmitrieff, who co-directed the Women’s Union, wore a magnificent red gown, the waist encrusted with pistols.

Style is never less than proof of life. Toward the end of the book, Lucy and Kémi discuss Edward Said’s On Late Style, both in a state of near despair. Lucy fears a verdict on her whole existence: failed writer, bad niece. Kémi tells her that late style may not correspond to chronology:

Someone can be preternaturally old for a minute or a week at twelve, or twenty-seven. Anybody knows this, he said. Lateness is not linear. Given that its milieu is hopelessness, lateness is a political event, not a result of chronology. When there is no hope, style really exists.

The eruption of the political in a book so preoccupied with philosophers, poets, fabrics, and surfaces may sound unconvincing. Robertson makes it work, not least because she never deviates from her obsessions. “Cousin, he said, for hopelessness go to the Louvre and look at Poussin’s Deluge. It was his last painting.” We consider Poussin’s last painting in old age, daubed slowly with shaking hands, through Lucy and her companionable dialogue with Chateaubriand, which builds to an ekphrastic sublime:

Chateaubriand had written of The Deluge. He was a lover of Poussin…. We’re standing backward, Chateaubriand and me, balanced on the lip of the tarnished gilt frame, in the whorehouse of the Louvre, whatever, the whorehouse of culture.

Chateaubriand too was a late bloomer, a slow writer, an “ambassador to a fallen era.” Word by word, Lucy builds the courage necessary to see that she still has time to write a book that honors the Bièvre and her great-aunt Em, and that her immersion in histories does not mark her as a sleepwalker or a reactionary. And even reactionaries are, frankly, allowed their resistance to an “intolerable present”: “He says of the exiled imperialists he encountered in Switzerland that they had the air of lapsed divinities descended on ropes from the rafters of the opera, in their louche chariots of gold cardboard.”

By the end of Riverwork there are tears for the failures of those women and their rebellions, as well as a deluge that is in fact the deluge we are all living through in the present. Robertson nowhere refers to the squalid digital torrent in which we find ourselves, but it is everywhere resisted, in her luxurious descriptions of slow reading; in her association of reading with nonconformism and even theft—as in stealing back your time, your life; in her recontextualizing of obsolete vocabulary that reads like music to the ears; in her insistence on a kind of synesthesia that happens during reading or in libraries, “a pervasive closed-in whiff of winter and old paper” with “notes of clove and saddle leather and woodsmoke.” The pleasures awaiting the reader are heady, immense, and radical, and thank goodness for us that neither we nor Robertson has come too late.