Seeing Further
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
