Seeing further

Esther Kinsky

Book - 2024

"In this Sebaldian autobiographical novel by a leading German author and translator, a 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 Alfold, 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 cinema. Once the heart of the village, it has been boarded up for years. Entranced by the mozi, as cinema is known in Hungarian, she soon finds herself embarking on the colossal task of reviving it, entranced by what... she calls "a dream in a glass coffin," the preservation of the cinematic experience, "beautiful and undecayed like Snow White, in some people's thoughts and memories, nourishing the fantasy of it reawaking." What follows is a history of place, told by the town's few remaining inhabitants and uncovered in physical traces of the past left behind in the grand old building. Seeing Further illuminates the cinema's former role as a communal space for collective imagining, a site rooted in ritual that has steadily disappeared. For Esther Kinsky, it nevertheless 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 the cinema in words and pictures"--

Saved in:
1 person waiting
1 being processed

1st Floor New Shelf Show me where

FICTION/Kinsky Esther
0 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
1st Floor New Shelf FICTION/Kinsky Esther (NEW SHELF) Due Dec 14, 2024
Subjects
Genres
Autobiographical fiction
Novels
Published
New York : New York Review Books 2024.
Language
English
German
Main Author
Esther Kinsky (author)
Other Authors
Caroline Schmidt (translator)
Physical Description
pages cm
ISBN
9781681378510
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

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.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.