One morning in August, a few days after the world climate report was published.

In southern Europe the forests are on fire, in Germany people have been trying for weeks to cope with the consequences of the flood disaster.

Olivia Laing, writer, sits in her house in the south of England and talks about a book that she wrote over ten years ago and which now, the timing couldn't be better, has been published in German.

Anna Vollmer

Editor in the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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"To the river. A journey beneath the surface ”makes a shiver run down your spine these days, as it reads in some places like a current newspaper report with place names exchanged:“ The high tide reached at 9:30 in the evening in Malling, where the water is stood two stories high. The streets and railroad tracks were also flooded, and Lewes had turned into an island, cut off from the outside world by the wild river. Water is clever, that's for sure. It penetrates the smallest gap, no matter how tight the doors, does not distinguish between church and sewer. Wherever you looked, it literally took everything with you: prayer books, children's toys, underwear, dead rats. "

The flood of which Olivia Laing writes occurred ten years before she embarked on the hike her book is about, in 2000, in the small English town of Lewes.

Laing, who “compulsively” reads the news and has accordingly seen the pictures from Germany and China, says: “Isn't it amazing that we both manage to get up in the morning every day?”

The people who lived here

At first glance, “Zum Fluss” is not a book about climate change. Rather, this particular mixture of different genres perhaps best describes the biography of a river, the Ouse. A small, insignificant river in the south of England, which gained a certain fame simply because the English writer Virginia Woolf drowned herself here in 1941. Laing takes this event as an opportunity to go on a hike from the source to the mouth of the river via Woolf, but also to think about everything else that connects her with the Ouse and the surrounding area: medieval battles, sagas and myths, Pub talk and industrialization.

Above all, Laing writes about the people who lived here: About Woolf and her husband Leonard, about the English writer Kenneth Grahame, but also about amateur archaeologists or simple residents who made it into the local archives by chance.

Laing spent a lot of time in these archives, studying handwritten chronicles from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

It is, she says, a luxury to know a place so well.

Memoir, artist biography and essay

It is a luxury for their readers not only to have to rummage through boring city chronicles, but to learn from Laing what is really interesting. For example, that dog fights took place in the Bank of England at the end of the 19th century or that employees slaughtered sheep in the toilet: “There was a lot of drinking, little work and, on the whole, apparently no less rampant and decadent than among the hedge fund managers and Forex traders of our day. "