Description
Description
In this autobiographical novel by a leading German author and translator, the narrator attempts to revive a run-down Hungarian movie theater--an unpromising endeavor that soon leads into a consideration of the building's history and an homage to the power of the cinema, imperiled as it may be in our time. While travelling through the Great Alföld, the vast plain in southeastern Hungary, the narrator of Seeing Further stops in an all but vacant town near the Romanian border. There she happens upon a dilapidated movie theater. Once the heart of the village, it has been boarded up for years. Entranced, she soon finds herself embarking on the colossal task of renovating it in order to preserve the cinematic experience. Seeing Further illuminates the cinema's former role as a communal space for collective imagining. For Esther Kinsky and her narrator, it remains a place of wonder, a dark room that unfurls a vastness not beholden to the ordinary rules of time and space. Seeing Further is an homage to cinema in words and pictures.
About the Author
About the Author
Esther Kinsky is the author of six volumes of poetry and five novels. She has translated many notable English and Polish authors into German. Her novels River and Grove won numerous literary prizes in Germany. Her novel Rombo, published by New York Review Books in 2023, was awarded the W.-G.-Sebald-Literaturpreis in 2020 after its initial publication in Germany. In 2022, Kinsky was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize for her oeuvre. 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. Her translation of Esther Kinsky's Rombo was published by New York Review Books in 2023.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Brilliantly translated by Kin and Hennessy, this captivating collection from Ukrainian poet Andrukhovych is animated by local legend, regional history, and personal recollection....Wide-ranging and representative of Andrukhovych's many strengths, this is a valuable English-language introduction to an important poet." --Publishers Weekly "Seeing Further is an elegy for the shared space of the cinema and the promise of a collective waking dream, a profound and melancholy meditation on the shift from public to private viewing that is itself a visionary feat. Esther Kinsky's narrator is both camera and projector, capturing and transmitting haunting images of daily life in the endless expanse of the Hungarian lowlands, where past and present dissolve into one another as people wait for a future that never arrives. It is a novel saturated with loss and mystery, and a profound reckoning with the historical forces and material conditions that have forever altered the terms of how we see." --Christine Smallwood "This fixation with 'the how of seeing' allows Kinsky to show off her fine-tuned skills as a cultural theorist, with flashes of essayistic brilliance running through the narrative as she tries to tease out the essential, elusive charm of the cinema." --Lou Selfridge, FRIEZE "Kinsky (Rombo) delivers a discursive paean to the transformative power of cinema." --Publisher's Weekly
"Sorrow bleeds through... the decline of cinema epitomizing profound loss." --Kirkus Reviews "Esther Kinsky has created a literary oeuvre of impressive stylistic brilliance, thematic diversity and stubborn originality... Far from 'eco-dreaming' without sorrow or critique, Kinsky's novels and poems position humanity in relation to the ruins it has produced and what still remains of nature." --2022 Kleist Prize jury "According to Kinsky, cinema was a place of refuge, 'a shelter with a view' where one could see further than one's immediate surroundings and into a vast 'scope of possibilities'. ... But if this book is about broader horizons, it is equally about developing a practice of looking closely." - Yuwen Jiang, Art Review
"Sorrow bleeds through... the decline of cinema epitomizing profound loss." --Kirkus Reviews "Esther Kinsky has created a literary oeuvre of impressive stylistic brilliance, thematic diversity and stubborn originality... Far from 'eco-dreaming' without sorrow or critique, Kinsky's novels and poems position humanity in relation to the ruins it has produced and what still remains of nature." --2022 Kleist Prize jury "According to Kinsky, cinema was a place of refuge, 'a shelter with a view' where one could see further than one's immediate surroundings and into a vast 'scope of possibilities'. ... But if this book is about broader horizons, it is equally about developing a practice of looking closely." - Yuwen Jiang, Art Review
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
New York Review of Books
Pub date:
2024-11-12
Length:
224 pages
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