Reviews

• Super enjoyable wander through history and landscape

  Super enjoyable wander through history and landscape - Laing is excellent here as always. Great book to spend time with

• I like Olivia Laing's writing

  I like Olivia Laing's writing. She's deeply personal even when looking at a river. I've learned so much: the deep history along the Ouse River in Sussex; the history of Leonard Woolf (as well as Virginia Woolf but most everyone knows something of her history); as well as reviewing a romantic relationship recently ended. There's tales of life and death along the Ouse, not only Virginia, but common and not so common folk. If you've yet to read Olivia Laing, do. She's a masterful writer.

• Walking the river flow

  Just as some people have perfect pitch, which they can then learn to tune even more finely, and some have eyes which are attuned to see ever finer gradations of tone, colour and shade, and can then further train and refine this gift, some, I believe, resonate with a precision and refinement towards words, language itself, and are capable of conceptualising and describing the world new-minted, fresh, present. Such a one is Olivia Laing, as this marvellous book effortlessly demonstrates. When I say `effortlessly' I don't mean that its construction necessarily came trippingly and fully formed for the writer - maybe it did, I don't know - but that the reader has no sense of affect being striven for, no sense of `my, what beautiful writing in terms of showy flashness in description. It isn't that I read with a sense of `what a beautiful description of a sunset' - more, I read without effort, slowly, presently, observantly. Sentence followed sentence, and both the parts and the whole just WERE. This is authentic writing, and from first to last I just had the sense, which might often come with music which is balanced, and somehow winds the listener more deeply into itself, that `this is the moment; and this; and this' Laing has written a walking journey the length of the River Ouse, which effortlessly weaves the long history of the planet, of geological time and evolution, with recorded historical fact, with the industry of place, with social history - and with the short lives of individuals, and how they connect to place. She renders all fascination, and the powerful presence of her writing had me reading with a kind of breathlessness, heart and lungs almost afraid to move on, so much did I want to ingest and inhabit each step of the journey, each sentence of the book. Presiding over all, for Laing, and moving through the feel of the book, is Virginia Woolf, who, as we know, on a day in 1941 walked out into the Ouse with a pocket full of stones. Woolf was a woman perhaps too finely calibrated for the world, sharing with some other writers with an exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, a feeling too attuned to unsheathed nerve endings, unmyelinated. But what such writers can do is perhaps to waken and unwrap those of us who are too tightly sheathed AGAINST perception. Laing solidly walks the journey, feet well on the ground, noticing, noticing. I could have taken virtually any and every sentence from her book to illustrate the harmony, perception, reflection of her writing. I did start underlining, but quickly abandoned, as the book itself needs underlining "The path spilled on down a long lion-coloured meadow into a valley lined with ashes. There the river ran in riffles over the gravel beds that the sea trout need to breed. I crossed it at Hammerhill Bridge, running milky in the sun, and climbed east again into Hammerhill Copse.The land had lain opento the morning and now it seemed to close up like a clam. There was a woman's coat hanging over the gate to the wood, the chain padlocked about it like a belt. Who drops a coat in a wood? The label had been cut out, and the pink satin lining was stippled by mould" Reading this book, I feel invited, constantly by the writer, to both inhabit the presence of the time and place of her journey, and, in an echo of Robert Frost's poem, stay aware of the other paths and possibilities that might have been taken Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other,

• Five Stars

  Every aspect excellent. Thanks!

• To the River

  This is the story of a journey that author, Olivia Laing, took in midsummer; walking the length of the River Ouse. The journey was prompted by the break-up of a relationship and the journey prompts her to muse on many different subjects; from nature, geology, fossil hunting, history, children’s novels and, of course, Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide by drowning in the River Ouse, in 1941. Although Woolf’s shadow lies heavily over the book, so does the history of the area. Although you do feel that the past is very much part of the landscape, there is also much that makes the journey feel immediate. Sometimes, this is due to snippets of conversation, or simply rubbish that the author comes across. It is difficult to define this book, but Laing is an excellent travelling companion and I enjoyed her company for the length of her journey. This is reflective and interesting; part memoir, part history and part nature/travel book, the subjects covered meander like the turns of the river bank that the author follows.

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