Grove is a story of an existence stilled by loss, but the promise of life, and with it renewal and hope, pulses gently but steadily at its heart.”—Lucy Scholes, Financial Times
“A philosophical jewel seeking revelation in interstices, absences, ruptures, and the passages between existence and memory."—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Like a landscape painter who day after day sets up their easel outside, Esther Kinsky directs her eyes onto the terrain, studies it at particular times and in ever-changing weather, seeks to understand its anatomy as well as the way it is used by people.”—Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
“[Esther Kinsky] has an endless amount of words and expressions, an almost eerily differentiated vocabulary for the fallows, marshland, groves, woods, for that botanical-geological in-between, which is also an in-between of meaning . . . This much absence in the presence of words is rare, and it makes for great art.”—Süddeutsche Zeitung
“For it is this ambivalence, this relaxed cleaving asunder, this shimmering multiplicity of meanings, every thing the narrator notes and keeps from her two recent trips to Italy and the memory of countless previous ones with her long-dead father, that gives this book its extraordinary charm.”—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“Delivered in rhythmic prose, sparsely furnished with metaphorical comparisons, and immaculately composed, Grove is an impressive song of mourning and, at the same time, a still life of subdued colors.”—Deutschlandfunk Kultur
“Esther Kinsky’s excursions and wanderings . . . are Italian Journeys of a unique kind. Appealing to all the senses they explore the external terrain, and yet take the reader inward, to potential closure with grief and pain, and to islands of solace. The traveler’s compassionate, precise gaze elicits from the landscape that which is usually concealed: mystery and beauty.”—BUCH-MAGAZIN
“Kinsky’s language is always a phonetic wonder. Stringing together chirping consonants and breathy vowels, her sentences have a sound to which one willingly submits. Essentially Kinsky is a musician, playing letters instead of notes.”—Rheinische Post
“Poetry of the most beautiful kind—Esther Kinsky’s works are exceptionally, exceptionally shimmering literary jewels. Kneel down before them!—literaturmarkt.info
★ 2020-05-04
Poetic and painterly, a meticulously observed contemplation of the world that was, the world that is, and the world that might have been and the boundaries that join and define them.
Following the death of her partner, known only as "M.," an unnamed narrator travels to Italy, where she briefly settles among the muted rhythms of a small town nestled in the hills surrounding Rome. Able to approach this loss only obliquely, her mourning takes the form of meditative walks, deep immersion in memories and dreams, and explorations of strangers' gravesites in cemeteries to which she has no connection, a habit instilled by her late father during their travels through Italy in her childhood. Her father was a German speaker whose bond to Italy was formed at the borderland of cultures, through his affinity for its language, art, and history. This he passed on to her as well, and she retraces these earlier journeys and embarks on new discoveries, her thoughts unfurling slowly across the landscape, rising and falling with the hills of Lazio. Light and shadow, color and shape, time and distance shift vertiginously according to her vantage point and the scope of her focus, which dilates from minutest detail to sweeping panorama, then narrows again; her sense of place within the landscape and the wider world alters, too, with each change in perspective, suggesting that how one sees is at least as important as what one sees. Ancient Etruscan necropolises and the untended graves of the long dead speak to the persistence of presence even through the absence of anyone left to remember, as symbols continue to signify where no one exists to decipher their meaning. As she wanders unhurried on the perpetual threshold of spring, the observed nesting upon the remembered upon the fictive realities of literature and film, the narrator bestows equal care and attention on rusted-out construction materials and blowing trash as on blooming mimosas and elegant herons in the marshland around Ferrara, where she contemplates the works of Giorgio Bassani and the great palimpsest that is Italy. Here at last she untangles the question central to her explorations of memory and place: whether she belongs to the side of the vii, the living, or of the morţi, the dead.
A philosophical jewel seeking revelation in interstices, absences, ruptures, and the passages between existence and memory.
