<p>‘<em>River</em> is an unusual and stealthy sort of book in that it’s the opposite of what it appears to be – which is a rather apt dissimulation, as it turns out. Yes, it rifles through both the rich and rank materials of the world, turning over its trinkets and its tat, in a manner that is initially quite familiar – however, this curious inventory demonstrates an eye for the grotesque and does not hold the world aloft, or in place. Here, details blur boundaries rather than reaffirming them, positing a worldview that is haunted and uncanny. Shifting through unremarkable terrain we encounter the departed, the exiled, the underneath, the other side. We are on firm ground, always; yet whether that ground is here or there, now or then, is, increasingly, a distinction that is difficult and perhaps irrelevant to make. Sea or sky, boy or girl, east or west, king or vagrant, silt or gold; by turns grubby, theatrical, and exquisite, we are closer to the realm of Bakhtin’s carnival than we are to the well-trod paths of psychogeography. Kinsky’s <em>River</em> does indeed force us to stop in our tracks and take in the opposite side.’<br />
— Claire-Louise Bennett, author of <em>Pond</em><br />
</p>

<p>‘Our narrator is an ambulant consciousness open to stimulus, like a video recorder left running. She's not searching for anything. She's just there, enduring in the company of rust, moss, dirt, cracks, puddles, half-dead grass, rubbish, wire, random bricks, concrete without purpose, the blackened ground from past bonfires, holes, fragments of fabric, plastic toys, weeds, saplings and dead animals. […] [<em>River</em>'s] main subject is the sense of materiality, and its complement, light, that accompanies the narrator from her childhood on the Rhine through sojourns in other riparians homes-from-home, on the St Lawrence in Canada, on the Vistula in Poland. […] The form of <em>River</em> mirrors its content; its consciousness flows with a sense that, like water to the sea, it will one day lose itself. It is appropriately, seamlessly translated by Iain Galbraith.’<br />
— Lesley Chamberlain, <em>Times Literary Supplement</em></p>

<p>‘Rich in atmosphere, <em>River</em> meanders like its liquid locales […] Iain Galbraith, who has also translated Sebald, gives <em>River</em>, and all its "lumber of cumbersome jetsam", a special English poetry of grunge and grime.’<br />
— <em>The Economist</em></p>