Laura Vinogradova’s achingly beautiful and hypnotic novella The River, originally published in Latvian in 2020, explores loss, belonging, and grief, all while presenting a master class in crafting a bucolic setting.
Few authors can immerse their readers completely in their worlds of fiction, convincing them the story they are reading is true. Vinogradova is one of those authors. She situates us in rural Latvia, in an old country house that Rute, the protagonist, inherited from her absent father:
This house is built from cracks, the ones between old boards. And the only thing keeping the cracks together is the boards. The wind from the river fully fills a house like this.
Here, Rute mourns her sister, Dina, who was kidnapped ten years previously, when they were both in their late twenties—but her attempts at isolation are interrupted when she becomes acquainted with her neighbors, Matilde, a single mother, and her brother, Kristofs, a fisherman. The siblings disclose stories about the father Rute never knew: “[She] doesn’t even remember what he looks like. When they told her, ‘Your father has died,’ Rute had wanted to say, ‘Again?’” She learns that he rescued people who were emotionally bereft or made homeless by letting them stay with him, and that he was a bibliophile, which entices Rute, a literary translator, to begin reading from his library.
But it is the river near the house that is the soul of the book. The river creates a utopia, tethering Rute there, away from her husband, whom she abandons in Riga over the summer. Epistolary interruptions allow the reader to delve into Rute’s painful cogitations about Dina mingled with her love of the river:
Sis, I want to tell you about the river. About me in the river. It makes me tremble and shiver. It makes me laugh. It’s been so long since I felt this alive. The water is fairly clear by the dock. Deep. I can’t touch the bottom. I’d have to go under a bit. You can cross it in no time. If you want to get a good swim in you kind of have to circle around. You can feel the current. If you let it, it’ll carry you, though I don’t know how far.
Sis! I want to stay in the river.
I wish you’d come back . . .
Love you.
The late American author, critic, and professor John Gardner wrote that a novella “is a single stream of action focused on one character and moving through a series of increasingly intense climaxes.” Although the climaxes are subtle, Vinogradova follows these guidelines flawlessly. From the start, the plotting of the novella indicates Rute’s agonizing search for happiness. Vinogradova opens with a flashback to Rute’s impoverished childhood, a result of her mother’s dalliances with numerous men. We then move with Vinogradova as she recounts Dina’s kidnapping, and the painful fact that she has never been found, before progressing ten years into the future, with Rute, to the house her father bequeathed to her. It is here that Rute finds herself in a kind of stasis, occasionally interrupted by dinners with Matilde and Kristofs. It is also here that she finds joy in life, in the river, in planting potatoes, in Matilde’s young sons, in befriending Kristofs. And it is here that Rute must decide whether she will permanently break free from her husband on the mere hope that Dina might one day come home, as conveyed in another missive:
Sis, if you knew how much I miss you! It’s been almost ten years since I last saw you. Hah! I don’t know about you, but on the tenth anniversary, I’m going to howl. I’ll go down to the river, fall to my knees, and howl. One of these days you’ll have to hear me, and then you’ll have to howl back.
Dina, you’re my anger, my desire, my pain. You are such a strong part of me, such an empty part . . . Dina, am I your empty part, too? Can you live with that emptiness?
It is not just Rute who is searching for something. All of Vinogradova’s characters seek a nexus. Matilde’s parents gave her up, leaving her grandmother to raise her and Kristofs, creating a void in their hearts. Growing up, Rute and Dina moved several times, always a burden to their mother and her latest boyfriend. And now Rute’s mother, imprisoned for an unfathomable crime, is seeking companionship. Vinogradova’s chapter about Rute’s prison visit is especially poignant, exposing just how lost —and selfish—one person can be.
Vinogradova’s sentences have a staccato rhythm that allows the reader to appreciate her sparse prose, although there are snatches of repetition that underscore Rute’s inner churning:
“Old floors. Old windows. Old stove and range. Old, old, old. It’s the only word that comes to mind. Old shed and old flowerbeds, an old well, and the old willow in the yard.”
The letters from Rute to Dina likewise provide a glimpse into Rute’s most intimate thoughts, and the author leans on metaphor to skillfully supplant certain moments in the readers’ minds: “The river is the older sister to my despair,” Rute writes to her sister, disclosing the agony of Dina’s absence.
Because it invites us to sympathize with the characters and experience their painful emotions, Vinogradova’s writing evokes qualities of her Nordic peers Knut Hamsun and Per Petterson. Kaija Straumanis’s translation uses clear diction, preserving the emotional power of metaphor and letters. She adroitly transfers Latvian into English, sometimes incorporating snippets of Latvian culture—quips when Kristofs is on the boat, for instance. At one point she works the lines of a Daina (a traditional Latvian folk song) into a scene:
“Tūdaliņ, tāgadiņ, man tā kurpe pušums . . .”
—Pušu! Kristofs corrects, calling to the other room.
The little voice stops for a second, and then starts again:
“Tūdaliņ, tāgadiņ, man tā kurpe pušums . . .” [“Right now, right now my shoe is broken.”]
The River is threaded with unanswered questions and painful episodes. The characters are broken and search for love and belonging through communing with the natural world. So maybe the river, which is full of endless possibilities and peace, will quell Rute’s disquiet, and maybe Matilde’s sons will provide her with the anchor she has been searching for her entire life. And maybe Kristofs will rely on the sounds of the sea—“the motor running, the waves lapping against the side of the boat, the wind”—to stave off his loneliness. And maybe The River will help you navigate a tough time in your life.
Copyright © 2025 by Wayne Catan. All rights reserved.
