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
Mayröcker, 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.
“Rombo’s fractured chorus of voices dramatizes the ruptures created
by the trauma of the earthquake. Together, the eyewitness accounts
produce a kind of shifting mosaic – one might call it ‘rubble
narration’ – which tries to convey the catastrophe, and
the community it destroyed, while stranded irredeemably in the
aftermath... For Kinsky, nature ultimately provides no escape from
loss, no solace or release from human tragedy (it is sometimes, as
with the earthquake, the cause of it). What it may offer, however,
is the possibility of coming to terms with this absence-filled
world.” —Andrew Wells, New Left Review
“Rombo is at once similar to and very different from Kinsky’s
earlier works. It retains a deep attachment to the importance of
landscape, self, and memory, and pieces together a narrative spread
across time and place, but also lends itself to an established
tradition in European literature—novelized history writing, a
fictionalized biography, presented as testimony, and seeking to
refract history into the minutiae of daily life... in collating
this polyphonic account of landscape and language, Kinsky
illustrates the difficult navigation of that senseless new order,
in a land as inconstant as limestone, where the jagged mountains
rise up and up on all sides.” —Aditya Narayan Sharma, Los Angeles
Review of Books
"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
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
