Seeing further

Kinsky (Rombo) delivers a discursive paean to the transformative power of cinema. The unnamed narrator begins by recounting a visit to Norway, where the "dramatic" alpine landscape made her feel like she was in a Carl Theodor Dreyer film. She then rewinds to her childhood, when she was haunted by the animated film Bambi and came to prefer the realism of "real movies," because of the relief offered by their endings ("The window of the screen into another world had to close"). As a young woman, an affection for Hungarian films compels the narrator to frequently visit Budapest, where she encounters a group of like-minded movie lovers who lost their modest movie house during WWII and helps them rebuild it. Kinsky includes plaintive black-and-white photos of the Budapest cinema and other landmarks mentioned in the text. Cinephiles and W.G. Sebald fans alike will devour this passion project. (Oct.)

German author Kinsky's spare, abstract fiction centers on a woman's nostalgia for experiencing movies in a theater. Like the iconoclastic filmmaker John Cassevetes, whom she quotes throughout, Kinsky avoids conventional plot structure and psychological probing. Her unnamed narrator spends pages describing the physical world, often as a vista of "flatness and vastness"--vastness being a favorite word--and musing about the relationship between image and memory, cinema as "vastness…bound to this physical place," and the "communality of the cinematic experience." Meanwhile, she reveals little about the emotional landscape of the people around her and shares only the barest details of her own story. As a child in an unnamed, probably Eastern European country (given that she studied Polish and Russian), she watches no television and only occasionally visits the cinema with her father, whose reticence is the only characteristic she mentions. As an adult, she takes photographs, but whether as a career or hobby isn't clear. No intimate friends show up, only acquaintances. After years in London, described by the names of movie theaters she frequented, she moves to Budapest, where an elderly neighbor named Julika mentions that she once "had a fellow who was a great cinema man." Traveling around southeast Hungary, the narrator finds a small town with an abandoned movie theater she decides to buy and restore after meeting its former projectionist and some other locals. At this point, Kinsky drops in an "interlude" telling the story of a young cinema enthusiast known as Laci who brings movies to his hometown during World War II with the help of a young woman named Julika; while their romance is half-baked and Julika eventually leaves, Laci's lifelong obsession with cinema is passionate. The narrator takes up her own story again as she completes her restoration and attempts to reopen what had been Laci's theater. Ultimately, sorrow bleeds through the narrator's (and author's) reserve, the decline of cinema epitomizing profound loss--of place, of beloved people (see the dedication at the end), of optimism. A cerebral elegy that demands patience, even from serious film lovers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.