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Rombo: A Novel
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About the Author

Esther Kinsky is the author of six volumes of poetry and four novels, most recently Grove, which won the 2018 Leipzig Book Fair Prize. A prolific translator, Kinsky has translated many notable English and Polish writers into German, including John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, and Olga Tokarczuk. Her novel River was longlisted for the German Book Prize in 2014.

Caroline Schmidt has translated poetry by Friederike Mayroecker, as well as art historical essays, museum catalogues, and exhibition texts for Albertina in Vienna and Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, among others. She lives in Berlin.

Reviews

"A lyrical, meticulous inquiry into the alchemy of memory." -Kirkus Reviews

"Written in the form of a travelogue, this fictional narrative-named for the Italian word for 'rumble'-records the memories of survivors of two earthquakes that devastated the Friuli region of Italy in the nineteen-seventies. Kinsky threads their stories with descriptions of native flora. . . . While the narrator offers insights about collective trauma and the transformative impact of nature's whims on one's sense of home, the book is filled with the voices of the landscape's inhabitants." -The New Yorker

"A chorus of seven villagers narrate the novel from a vantage point close to the present day . . . . Kinsky is also a poet, and she has a poet's ear for rhythm and precision, elegantly rendered in Caroline Schmidt's translation. The author has a great gift for describing landscape." -Charlie Lee, TLS

"It reads cinematically; the cuts are determined and stylistic. . . .The book excels when it manages to balance the grand geology of its subject matter on the tiny gestures of daily life. . . . Rombo is staggering. There is something epic about it." -Magnus Rena, Review 31

"Kinsky expertly animates the natural world around her while removing her human hand. . . . If trauma is the inability to redescribe, Rombo offers a powerful antidote in language and the infinite possibilities of description." -Matthew Janny, Financial Times

"Esther Kinsky has more eyes than most; in her novel Rombo she evokes the entire life of an Italian village before, during, and after the two devastating earthquakes of 1976, but each plant and animal central to the village is also a character, and the most important character of all is the landscape itself. The book becomes as much about the futures as the past, for our natural disasters are increasingly man-made, and we need more than ever this reminder of universal impermanence and the marks of memory we leave in its wake." -Mary Ruefle

"A tragic travelogue to the underworld-turned-world that recasts a newly lost Italian past with a climate-wise chorus straight out of the most harrowing Greek drama." -Joshua Cohen

"In Esther Kinsky's new novel language becomes the highest form of compassion and solidarity - not only with us human beings, but with the whole world, organic, non-organic, speaking out with many mouths and living voices. A miracle of a book; should be shining when it gets dark." -Maria Stepanova

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