SecondThe morning of August, a few days after the world climate report was published. In southern Europe, forests are on fire. In Germany, people have been struggling with the aftermath of flooding for weeks. The writer Olivia Laing sits at her home in the south of England and talks about a book she wrote more than ten years ago. The timing couldn’t be better now and it has been published in German.
“To the river. Journey under the water” these days make your spine tremble because it is read in some places, as the current newspaper report exchanges place names: “The climax reached at 9:30 pm in Malling, where the The water stand is two stories high. The street and railroad tracks are also flooded, and Lewis has become an island, cut off from the outside world by a wild river. Water is smart, that’s for sure. It penetrates the smallest gap, no matter the door No matter how tight it is, there is no distinction between the church and the sewer. No matter where you look, it takes everything you have: prayer books, children’s toys, underwear, dead mice.”
Olivia Laing wrote that the flood happened ten years before she started hiking, and her book is about the year 2000, which happened in the English town of Lewis. Ryan, who read the news “compulsively” and saw photos from Germany and China accordingly, said: “Isn’t it amazing that we can get up every morning?”
People who live here
At first glance, “Zum Fluss” is not a book about climate change. On the contrary, this particular mixture of different genres may best describe the biography of Us River.A small river in southern England, just because the British writer Virginia Woolf Drowned here in 1941. Laing used this event as an opportunity to hike through Woolf from the source to the estuary, while also considering everything else that connects her to Ouse and the surrounding area: medieval battles, legends and myths, bar talks, and industrialization.
Most importantly, Lane wrote about the people who live here: about Woolf and her husband Leonard, about the British writer Kenneth Graham, and amateur archaeologists or accidentally entering the local archives. Ordinary residents. Lane spent a lot of time in these archives, studying handwritten chronicles of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. She said that knowing a place in this way is a luxury.
Memoirs, artist biographies and essays
For their readers, not only can they browse through the boring city chronicles, but they can also learn really interesting things from Ryan, which is a luxury.For example, in the late 19th century Bank of England Dog fights or employees slaughtered sheep in the toilet: “Drink a lot and work very little. In general, this is obviously no less than the rampant and decadent hedge fund managers and foreign exchange traders of our time.”
