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To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

Olivia Laing (Goodreads Author)

3.82 · Rating details · 1,240 ratings · 177 reviews

To the River is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Along the way, Laing explores the roles riv ...more

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Hardcover, 279 pages

Published 2011 by Canongate

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Sep 23, 2017 Paul rated it it was amazing

Shelves: bloomsbury

This is the story of the River Ouse in Sussex and the story of a week during which Laing walked the length of the river at midsummer. This, of course is the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself. The walk was prompted by the end of a relationship and a general feeling that rivers gave a sense of direction to those who have "lost faith with where they're headed". The Ouse is not a long river, only 42 miles, and Laing is able to feel generally unhurried as she sets aside a week to complete This is the story of the River Ouse in Sussex and the story of a week during which Laing walked the length of the river at midsummer. This, of course is the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself. The walk was prompted by the end of a relationship and a general feeling that rivers gave a sense of direction to those who have "lost faith with where they're headed". The Ouse is not a long river, only 42 miles, and Laing is able to feel generally unhurried as she sets aside a week to complete the journey. Laing enjoys the solitude and chance for reflection and examines the way history and landscape interlink. It also gives Laing reason to follow all sorts of literary, historical and natural leads. That is what makes this book so delightful.
Woolf is obviously a central figure and there is some interesting discussion of Between the Acts as well as a look at her life with Leonard Woolf and her death. Other forays include classical mythology, Bede’s Sparrow, nineteenth century dinosaur hunters, Piltdown man, Kenneth Grahame (Wind in the Willows), Iris Murdoch, a discussion of the various meanings of the word incapable in Gertrude’s description of the drowned Ophelia, the history of the Battle of Lewes in 1264 with discussions about Simon de Montfort and the current location of the armour and bodies, the annual migration of the wheatear and how it ended up in many nineteenth century pies, passages on floods and flooding and a discussion of the architecture of Hades; and much more, all linked together by the Ouse and by Laing’s passionate flights of intuition and inquisitiveness. “How strangely we spend our lives” Laing remarks and affirms Woolf’s comment about the Ouse valley, “this has holiness. This will go on after I am dead.”
Laing talks about her own history a little, about her parents and her recent break up (including the priceless throwaway comment, “For Christmas, Matthew had given me a Hoover”). But mostly we experience her journey and learn a great deal about the Ouse. Laing enjoys her solitude on the walk and sometimes other humans are an irritation. Laing has a sense of humour; encountering a group and loud and rather crass drinkers in a pub, she notes;
“After supper I walked out into the churchyard where Edward Gibbon was buried, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and died nearby of peritonitis after an operation to drain the massive inflammation of his testicles went wrong and poisoned his blood. In my head the woman’s voice translated: he had fucking big bollocks. It was an English voice and it had been going on forever: parochial and incensed, intent on cutting everything down to size.”
Laing is aware of her own frailties and inconsistencies and approaches moments that might have brought forth something Keatsian and poetic in a rather different way;
“..a whole Greek chorus of tits exchanging apprehension and admonition. I could hear them perfectly, but apart from the chaffinch I couldn’t see a bloody thing. After straining through binoculars for twenty minutes I became petulant”
Then a very human reaction to losing the path;
“I burst out, sweating, onto the marsh, but my relief didn’t last a minute. It wasn’t the path I wanted, not at all….I pulled off my rucksack and kicked it.”
And yet Laing can write beautifully and is an accomplished wordsmith, speaking of kestrels “pinned to the sky” and dragonflies “the size of kitchen matches”. The fate of a particular wood pigeon sparks this reverie;
“The present, the present. It never stops, no matter how weary you get. It comes unstintingly, as a river does, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll be swept off your feet. I should have warned the woodpigeon.”
It also links in to Laing’s own experience of depression and makes the book profound in often unexpected ways. As you can tell I liked this book. ...more

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Dec 17, 2019 Diane S ☔ rated it really liked it

Shelves: 5000-2019

3.5 As the holiday season approaches, I've been feeling very melancholy. This book seemed to completely reflect my mood. Walking the forty something miles from the beginning of the Ouse River, to the end, the author reflects back at what things this River has seen. Of course, the most famous, and the only one of which I was previously aware, is the suicide if Virginia Woolf. Can't get much more melancholic than that. To be honest, that was also a big draw for me. I find her writing and life fasc ...more

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Apr 13, 2016 James Murphy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I'd been attracted to this book by an attraction to Laing's most recent book, The Lonely City. Since I already had To the River in hand, I thought I'd see what she's about before committing to the newer one. Turns out she's about a lot.

Laing writes about the River Ouse in Sussex in southern England. Her goal was to walk the river from its source to the Channel, her intention to show what "that little patch of England looked like one midsummer week at the beginning of the twenty-first century." T I'd been attracted to this book by an attraction to Laing's most recent book, The Lonely City. Since I already had To the River in hand, I thought I'd see what she's about before committing to the newer one. Turns out she's about a lot.

Laing writes about the River Ouse in Sussex in southern England. Her goal was to walk the river from its source to the Channel, her intention to show what "that little patch of England looked like one midsummer week at the beginning of the twenty-first century." The result of her weeklong ramble along the river is marvelous, a book much like the W. G. Sebald novel The Rings of Saturn.

It's meditative, digressive, and concerns itself very much with history, memory, and nature. We all remember that it's the Ouse in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself. It flows through Rodmell where she lived and through which Laing walks, and so she reflects at length about Virginia and Leonard. There are also long a digression about Kenneth Grahame. I'd never known before that his The Wind and the Willows is set along the Ouse. She reflects on the classical idea of hell, the nature of pollen, the nature of memory, the discovery of dinosaurs (the first iguanodon fossil had been found there), and, to contrast real science with the bogus, the story of the Piltdown Man forgery, the fake skull fragments having been seeded in a gravel pit along the river's northern reaches. And there's much more as well as lyrical passages about the flora and fauna of the river she encounters walking its course.

It's not surprising the river's ecology is also a concern. She notes some recent animal species migrated from other regions, and even from other parts of Europe. They're not always welcomed by the locals and therefore sometimes looked on with a jaundiced eye by her. She writes nostalgically about species which have been lost in the recent past. Physical changes to the river draw her attention, whether the natural change of flooding or the man-made changes of development.

But she thinks that no changes have affected the rampant beauty of the river in its course and the landscape surrounding it. Her descriptions are rhapsodic, her love for this "little patch of England" evident in how the words make sparkling images on the page. Sparkle is a good word, I think--she writes so well that my impression of the book as a whole is a sparkling harmonizing of sun and sky and water reflecting each other. At the beginning she said she felt like Ishmael, needing to be near water. And so she set out to walk along the Ouse's water to the sea. And what she experiences during her journey, not only what the senses bring her but also the mental jogs the river and landscape evoke in her, is beautifully told. ...more

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Apr 01, 2020 Puck rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

“The present never stops, no matter how weary you get. It comes as a river does, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll be swept off your feet.

3,5 stars. A lovely, meditative memoir about the history and legacy of the river Ouse in England, and a reflection on the power and inspiration of water.

In her nonfiction novels, Olivia Laing always focuses on one subject – whether it is lonely artists living in New York, or famous American authors struggling with alcoholism – and studies it through the ...more

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Oct 08, 2020 Susan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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 fe ...more

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May 11, 2012 Rebecca rated it liked it

Shelves: writers-and-writing, biographical, nature, travel-books

(2.5) Laing hadn’t yet perfected the deft interplay of memoir, biography and travel writing that makes her next two books (The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City) so special. Here her ostensible subject is the River Ouse, a vague enough remit to encompass all manner of meandering talk about history, archaeology, geology, and so on. Unlike her other two books, which feel heavily urban, this one attempts nature writing. There are a few nice passages, but often her strategy is to simply list t ...more

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Oct 23, 2017 Callum McAllister rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Olivia Laing writes my favourite kind of non-fiction: part-memoir, mixed with the tools of any other genre that seem fit. I don't know how she does it to be honest. From one paragraph to the next she's talking about her own journey down the Ouse, to something Virginia or Leonard Woolf once said, to natural history, to medieval history, whatever. Also, she has writes with a real luxuriousness but also a rhythm that once you noticed it is almost quite bouncy and poetic. She's great. I want her to ...more

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Nov 03, 2012 Paul rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: natural-history, books-read-2014

There are many stories in the book, layered and interwoven, but all centred around the River Ouse that runs from Slaugham to Newhaven through the Sussex Weald. One summer Liang decides to walk the length of it to discover the history, the people that inhabit it, the wildlife and most importantly the sense of place.

This is the river where the great writer Virginia Woolf took her own life in 1941. Liang writes about her life and her troubled health and how she had been suffering from mental health ...more

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Apr 03, 2015 Claire rated it liked it

Shelves: nature-writing, memoir, biography, nonfiction, summer-of-women-2015, history

A relationship ends, prompting the author to plan a journey that follows the course of the river Ouse in Southern England, a river that has changed much over time, through man's battles, interventions and industrial/agricultrual practices.

As she walks the river, Olivia Laing narrates a number of those historic events, that the river now bears little trace of, including that last walk of Virginia Woolf, her pockets laden with heavy rocks as she strode into the river with purpose, her corpse emer A relationship ends, prompting the author to plan a journey that follows the course of the river Ouse in Southern England, a river that has changed much over time, through man's battles, interventions and industrial/agricultrual practices.

As she walks the river, Olivia Laing narrates a number of those historic events, that the river now bears little trace of, including that last walk of Virginia Woolf, her pockets laden with heavy rocks as she strode into the river with purpose, her corpse emerging 3 weeks later.

The narrative meanders like the river might have done, had it not had its more interesting aspects and life-filled curves, sliced and straightened long ago, making it in parts more like a dredged canal.

It is an attractive premise, to walk the length of a river as a form of therapy, writing and researching its length, though rather than submerge as Virginia Woolf was so drawn towards doing and did in this same river, Olivia Laing's journey is more one of, walk, pause, reflect on great battles, other lives lived, move swiftly on.

She spends little time reflecting on her own troubled narrative, the barely mentioned Matthew, a ghost-like figure never fully formed, their dilemma unshared on the page, instead it is the river we begin to grieve for, her character sliced and cut and reformed to meet the purpose of man, ignorant of the smaller life forms and species who were more dependent on it to survive than man.

Deflecting attention away from her own purpose, Laing has written a form of tribute to a little known river, a metaphor of life, with all the events that chip away at and form its character, though its true essence remains.

Of particular interest to those familiar with the landscape and interested in its history and of Virginia Woolf. The book may have held my attention more, if the author had reached deeper into the psyche to share more of her own inner journey, though it is true, these lessons are often realised long after the physical journey has taken place. ...more

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Oct 02, 2016 John rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, library_books, travel

My library permits a maximum of two three-week renewals beyond the initial loan period. I've finished the book today with a few days left of the nine weeks total, which is quite rare. What does that say in this case?

I started it (way back then) with high hopes, having liked Laing's travel/biography/criticism of six American writers: The Trip to Echo Spring. This one is similar in terms of being a travel/history hybrid, but tougher for me. Lots (and lots) of flora and fauna description, so much s ...more

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Apr 16, 2020 Arielle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nature-non-fic, non-fiction

This was so nearly a truly excellent read - I think it just needs tighter editing.
I found the constant re-referencing of topics already covered became grating. An example - one chapter might talk in depth about how Virginia Woolf did not attend school, and had a tutor for certain subjects instead, and what those subjects are, only for the next chapter to mention that Virginia Woolf did not attend school, and had a tutor for... etc etc, as if the subject had never before been broached. It makes ...more

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Oct 30, 2020 Vartika rated it really liked it · review of another edition

3.5 stars

This is the story of one midsummer week in 2011, when Olivia Laing decided to follow the river Ouse from source to sea.
"There is a mystery about rivers that draws us to them, for they rise from hidden places and travel by routes that are not always tomorrow where they might be today. Unlike a lake or a sea, a river has a destination and there is something about the certainty with which it travels that makes it very soothing, particularly for those who've lost faith with where they'
3.5 stars

This is the story of one midsummer week in 2011, when Olivia Laing decided to follow the river Ouse from source to sea.
"There is a mystery about rivers that draws us to them, for they rise from hidden places and travel by routes that are not always tomorrow where they might be today. Unlike a lake or a sea, a river has a destination and there is something about the certainty with which it travels that makes it very soothing, particularly for those who've lost faith with where they're headed."
60 years before Laing, the brilliant Virginia Woolf headed for the same waters with her pockets full of stones, perhaps having lost faith in where anything else was headed, and became a woman dissolved. Nearly 10 years after Laing's journey brimmed into this book about the Ouse, with its with meditations on memory, nature, and history and the ghost of Woolf hovering over it; I found myself aching for nature. There is a river near me, too, but one lost to the wounds and machinations that the city delivers. And so, here I am.

To The River is an eloquent early example of the deft interweaving of memoir, biography, and history that Laing is known for, but while these streams flow and lap over each other in all her works in a manner faintly reminiscent of Woolf it is here that she seems almost to have communed with the latter. And so the writing flits between her inner world and the one she travels to, observing the bounty of nature and the present while seeing, too, the ghosts of time.

In a series of lovely digressions she writes, too, of archeological forgeries, of Dante's underworld, of magpie hinting, of the biblical flood and the Blitz, and also of people like Kenneth Grahame; Iris Murdoch; Simon de Montfort; the Northumbrian monk Bede; the last king of France—and, of course, of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, whose lives together are as entwined with the river as all rivers with life.

Lilting and lyrical, sometimes slow and sometimes funny, To The River takes us across and under the 42 miles that the Ouse runs along, spotting for us the lush flora and fauna and old mill towns and stories gathered along the way. And as with all forceful rivers meeting their ends at the sea, it is hard not to gush. ...more

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Jul 08, 2020 Michael Livingston rated it really liked it

Beautiful nature writing interspersed with meandering local history - Laing has such remarkable range as a writer. I liked this most when it focussed on the walk itself - her descriptions of landscapes, wildlife and the interweaving of her memories of previous experiences were just wonderful. The divergences off into historical anecdotes - the Woolfs, historic battles, etc etc - occasionally meandered a bit too slowly for my tastes.

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Dec 26, 2012 Manfred rated it it was amazing

I have to say, this book took me by surprise. I knew little about the plot and thought it would be a plucky tale of a girl who gets cruelly dumped and then buys her first pair of hiking boots and sets out on a path of blisters and personal discovery.

I am happy to be quite mistaken in my initial impression. This is a wonderful and meandering book, it reminded me of Jim Harrison's "travel" writing minus the self-indulgence. Virginia Woolf (who I know nothing about) and her husband are major charac ...more

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Aug 01, 2017 Claire Fuller rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, read-in-2017

I loved this. Laing follows the river Ouse from its source to its mouth on the Sussex coast. Along the way she details the plants and the animals, the people she passes (and their verbatim conversations - which were great), and has many digressions into the history of the places she passes, including lots of information about Virginia Woolf (who drowned in the Ouse), and her husband. All of it fascinating. The only bit that dropped a little for me was the industrial mouth of the river - I found ...more

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Dec 07, 2019 Kim Stallwood rated it really liked it

If this were a film, it would be called a Road Movie but this is a book and the road is a river. The River Ouse runs some 42 miles (68 km) from its source at Horsham, West Sussex, to Seaford, East Sussex, where it meets the English Channel. Typically, the protagonist makes a trip to learn something new, resolve an outstanding matter or have an adventure. In Olivia Laing’s book, it appears to be more about recovering from the break-up of a relationship. It’s more than that, though, as the break-u If this were a film, it would be called a Road Movie but this is a book and the road is a river. The River Ouse runs some 42 miles (68 km) from its source at Horsham, West Sussex, to Seaford, East Sussex, where it meets the English Channel. Typically, the protagonist makes a trip to learn something new, resolve an outstanding matter or have an adventure. In Olivia Laing’s book, it appears to be more about recovering from the break-up of a relationship. It’s more than that, though, as the break-up isn’t centre stage. We’re taken down several diversions that have nothing to do with her private life. Some are more interesting than others. Nonetheless, this is an engaging book and one that impresses.

“I was pulled to the Ouse as a magnet is pulled to metal returning on summer nights and during the short winter days to repeat some walks,” Laing explains. “And when things began to falter in my own life, it was the Ouse to which I turned.” (page 4) She was living nearby in Brighton when her partner left. “[I]t was then that the idea of walking the river locked hold of me.” (page 5) She told people she’s going to make a survey. She bought maps and planned her journey. “The truth was less easy to explain,” she confides. “I wanted somehow to get beneath the surface of the daily world, as a sleeper shrugs off the ordinary air and crests towards dreams.” (page 6)

The diversions include life histories of such local figures as Gideon Algernon Mantell (1790 – 1852) who was an obstetrician, geologist and palaeontologist. A curious mix as only the Regency time of Jane Austen could manage. Then there’s a contemplation of Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s novel, The Wind in the Willows, where the characters and antics of Toad, Mole, and Badger also appeal to adults. There’s much discussion of the topography, the birds, the wild mammals, the insects, the plants, and the weather. She describes the people she sees, places she stays, and villages she visits. The descriptions are quite marvellous at times but sometimes I thought, “Get on with it!”

The book was first published in 2011. I recall from around that time hearing Laing speak at the Charleston Literary Festival. The annual festival takes the name of the Sussex farmhouse, Charleston, where artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant established in 1916 and lived in for the remainder of their lives. Today, the Charleston Trust manages the property which is open to the public and is recognised as the country home for the Bloomsbury Group. Charleston is in the village of Firle. The nearest town is Lewes, where Laing stays one night.

Bell is Virginia Woolf’s sister, who, with her husband, Leonard, lived in another village, Rodmell, which isn’t so very far away from Lewes. They bought Monk’s House in 1919. Virginia lived in it until she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941. Leonard died in Monk’s House in 1969. The Woolfs are an important diversion for Laing.

“Water in various guises features prominently in Virginia Woolf’s novels,” writes Laing. “The Voyage Out begins aboard a liner bound for South America, and To the Lighthouse is set so close to the edge of the Atlantic that the sound of the sea is heard on almost every page.” (page 194)

The Woolfs were atheists, as it seems is Laing. After Virginia’s suicide, Leonard sets a headstone in their Rodmell garden with an inscription from the end of her novel, The Waves: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” (page 211)

In a fitting end to the journey, Laing concludes, “[t]he home we’ll ever have is here. This is it, this spoiled earth.” As she goes to catch the train to Brighton, she says, “We crossed the river then and pulled away and in the empty fields the lark still spilled its praise.” (page 268) ...more

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Mar 11, 2015 Marcia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club

My favorite kind of non-fiction these days: A book of digressions formed of an interesting narrative frame hung with bits of natural, literary, and political history. I enjoyed this book immensely and am in awe of the amount of research it must have taken to make it, never mind that whole walking the length of a river thing.

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Jan 24, 2018 Louise Omer rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2018

An absolute delight.

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Apr 12, 2014 Lady Fancifull rated it really liked it

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 de ...more

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Jun 29, 2015 Tweedledum rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: natural-history, 2015-books-read, gr-review, sea-and-river-themes, history, journeys, sussex

Olivia Laing decides to walk the river Ouse in Sussex from source to sea. Walking is a great way to free the mind and this book faithfully reports her thoughts as she journeys or pethaps pilgrimages along the way. Sometimes nature is in the frame, sometimes history....the Ouse saw the calamitous rout of Simon De Montfort's army... Sometimes,
....quite a lot of the time it seemed , Laing is drawn to reflect on Virginia Woolf and her life and death since she drowned herself in the Ouse in 1941. It Olivia Laing decides to walk the river Ouse in Sussex from source to sea. Walking is a great way to free the mind and this book faithfully reports her thoughts as she journeys or pethaps pilgrimages along the way. Sometimes nature is in the frame, sometimes history....the Ouse saw the calamitous rout of Simon De Montfort's army... Sometimes,
....quite a lot of the time it seemed , Laing is drawn to reflect on Virginia Woolf and her life and death since she drowned herself in the Ouse in 1941. It emerges that Laing is recovering or perhaps still reeling from a broken relationship so perhaps this journey is a way of her walking out her own grief and misery. The book is a kind of "stream of consciousness" record, a tribute ,no doubt , to Woolf, and so the trivial or seemingly irrelevant sometimes pushes its way in between directed thoughts. This can be disconcerting at times,for example when Laing breaks off a lengthy musing to record a fragment of overheard conversation . The book ends abruptly with no great summing up or attempt to tie everything together and this too is disconcerting emphasising a frequent theme... I.e.Our essential loneliness and the impossibility of anyone ever truly knowing what is in the mind of another. This seems to be borne the it by the way Laing frequently returns to comment on Leonard Woolf's grief and despair following Virginia's death.

It appears as if Laing is perceiving everything she sees or hears as fragmentary but in contrast when she reflects on the historical events associated with the river these attain a solidity and reality far more powerful than the present moment. The present seems full of moments of loneliness or self pity followed by moments of elation...tiredness, energy, stillness, restlessness. Life in microcosm perhaps? Only when Laing takes to ther Over or sea itself do her tumbling thoughts subside and she seems to experience a more lasting peace.

I found the narrative compelling but at the end I wanted to ask......but what are you feeling now? I really wanted Laing to tell me "I am feeling much better now." But Laing leaves the reader hanging.... uncertain.... so perhaps that is the answer....

At the end of the journey Laing reported how she exchanged a few words with an elderly man who was watching the world go by and had greeted her. She wanted to tell him that she had walked the whole length of the river but she repressed this thought. That felt to me like a great pity. Sharing good news and our achievements is so important and so necessary for our psyche. But then what if that person wants to celebrate your achievement and you are still dealing with complex emotions.

Powerful thoughts and feelings can't be tidied away into neat packages and in the end Laing's honesty and willingness to share her thoughts honestly is the strength of this book. Her stories and anecdotes and descriptions are certainly interesting but she uses these to divert from the issue she really needs to explore.... Her own relationship loss. Such losses take a long time to heal. ...more

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Jan 18, 2016 Lizzie Huxley-Jones rated it it was amazing

I thoroughly believe that some books have to be read in certain places, and I desperately wanted to read To The River by the water, with a flask of coffee. However it's been below 0 on and off this week so much was read in the bath, or in bed listening to watery themed music. I finished the last 30 pages curled up with Winnie. To The River is Laing's first book, a travel memoir of her walking the Ouse in Sussex, interspersed with the history of the river and its residents, particularly Virginia ...more

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Aug 12, 2018 Jennifer rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

“A river passing through a landscape catches the world and gives it back redoubled: a shifting, glinting world more mysterious than the one we customarily inhabit. Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads, and there’s hardly an age I can think of that’s not associated with its own great waterway.”

To the River traces the Ouse from its source to the sea. Lyrical, beautiful, and packed with literary and social history, surely a must for fans of Virginia Woolf. This book also ...more

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Oct 16, 2011 Heather Noble rated it it was amazing

Poetic, lyrical, philosophical, this book meanders and begs the reader to linger and ponder. That's why it's taken me so long to read it, although I have been dipping in to other things. It would be lovely to read alongside a river under a shady tree on a perfect summer day.

And then there's the bibliography to peruse and savour for more books to read- just like a river flowing to a great ocean to explore. ...more

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Feb 22, 2015 Andy rated it really liked it

Laing's account of her walk along the length of the River Ouse in Sussex is an elegantly described, often dark, meditation on love, loss, history and literature, framed within a remembrance of, and reflection on, the final years of Virginia Woolf, who took her own life in the river in 1941.
...more

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Nov 11, 2017 Libby rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, read-in-2017

I love Olivia Laing and she's genuinely a genius. ...more

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Dec 06, 2020 Elsbeth Kwant added it

A wonderful watery book. A weeks walk beside the river Ouse, interspersed with thought on life, death and literature. Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in the Ouse figures prominently.
Andredesleague, the primeval forest, the marshes, hedgerows, querulous wrens, trances (Nature's gift to the walker), how your body consist of electrons which cause it to be more than an invisibility, Ithaka and Iris. A fugue of meaning, fluid as a river. ...more

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Nov 12, 2020 Sophy H rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: outdoor-nature

A well written and absorbing book about the River Ouse, and its (everlasting) connection with the author Virginia Woolf.

Laing's musings veer from humorous to melancholy to fascinating to introspective as she walks the line of the Ouse over the course of a hot summer.

There is some beautiful description in here and evocative tales of sights, smells and sounds.

Lovely. ...more

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Feb 05, 2013 Paul Blaney rated it really liked it

Not a straightforward walking book, but a literary meditation on landscape, nature, water, and the different characters who've lived along the short course of the River Ouse in Sussex. The book mixes reflections on Virginia Woolf and Kenneth Grahame, with geology, hydrology, palaeontology and occasional thoughts on the author's unsuccessful love-life. It's a rather melancholy, or elegaic read (and a few two many flowers mentioned for this horticultural ignorant) but some lovely writing plus phil ...more

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Mar 08, 2013 Michael Steger rated it it was amazing

'Outside the Downs had disappeared, obliterated by a swelling wall of thunderheads. The cloud was growing as I watched, banking up into headwalls and cornices and deep ice-blue gullies. It looked like the aftermath of an explosion, like the world beyond the hills had been bombed to smithereens. But that's how we go, is it not, between nothing and nothing, along this strip of life, where the ragworts nod in the repeating breeze? Like a little strip of pavement above an abyss, Virginia Woolf once ...more

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Nov 01, 2015 Kate Mathieson rated it it was amazing

When the city fatigues you, when everything is loud and noisy and the humdrum of life nags - take yourself with Olivia - to the river. A soulful journey, a tale of hope, and loss, a mirrored journey as Olivia unpacks the history of the river, the history of Virginia Woolf, and her own life threaded through it.

The writing is sublime, I felt each page took me to the river, where I was bathing in a cold river, seeping out the day, and I would always emerge feeling refreshed. Laing reminds you to lo ...more

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About Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing

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Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. Her first book, To the River (2011) is the story of a midsummer journey down the river Virginia Woolf drowned in. It was a book of the year in the Evening Standard, Independent and Financial Times and was shortlisted for the 2012 Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year.

Her second, The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), explores the liquid links between w ...more

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“It began to occur to me that the whole story of love might be nothing more than a wicked lie; that simply sleeping beside another body night after night gives no express right of entry to the interior world of their thoughts or dreams;that we are separate in the end whatever contrary illusions we may cherish; and that this miserable truth might as well be faced, since it will be dinned into one, like it or not by the failings of those we hold dear. I wasn't so bitter now. I'd begun to emerge into a sense of satisfaction with my not, but it would be a long time before I trusted someone, for I'd seen how essentially unknowable even the best loved might prove to be.” — 19 likes

“There are sights too beautiful to swallow. They stay on the rim of the eye; it cannot contain them.” — 9 likes

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