Rombo

Bewitching, exquisite, almost unbearably bittersweet (I had to blink back tears more than once), Rombo evokes the transience of all life through seven characters' accounts of what happened on the day and night of a devastating earthquake in the mountains of northern Italy in May 1976. Intermingled with their ruminations on the day that changed everything for them and their villages, as well as the long aftermath of the quake, is a kind of testimony from the plants, animals, and rock formations that make up the area, making the novel part of the emerging pluriversal genre, which feels so current and fresh, yet so ancient in its scope and wisdom. Kinsky enchants the reader throughout, especially when she begins weaving in a thread of local tales of witches turned to mountains, magical dwarves, and Riba Faronika, the fish-tailed woman bearing the world on her back who sleeps at the bottom of the sea and causes earthquakes as she stirs in her sleep. Recommended By Jennifer K., Powells.com

Seven survivors of the 1976 Friuli earthquake in northeastern Italy, which left hundreds dead and thousands unhoused, speak of their lives after the catastrophe in this poignant, propulsive work of fiction by a noted poet, translator, and novelist.

Il rombo is an Italian term for the subterranean rumble before an earthquake. In May and September 1976, two severe earthquakes ripped through the Friuli region in northeastern Italy, causing extensive damage. About a thousand people died under the rubble, tens of thousands were left without shelter, and many ended up leaving their homes forever.

Rombo is a record of this disaster and its aftermath, as told by seven men and women who were children at the time: Anselmo, Mara, Olga, Gigi, Silvia, Lina, and Toni. They speak of portents that preceded the earthquakes and of the complete disorder that followed, the obliteration of all that was familiar and known by heart. Their memories, like the earth, are subject to rifts and abysses. Esther Kinsky splices these indelible, incomplete recollections with exacting descriptions of the alpine region, forgoing a linear narrative for a deftly layered collage that reaches back and forth in time. The brilliantly original book that emerges is both memorial and purgatorial mount.

"Esther Kinsky has more eyes than most; in her novel Rombo she evokes the entire life of an Italian village before, during, and after the two devastating earthquakes of 1976, but each plant and animal central to the village is also a character, and the most important character of all is the landscape itself. The book becomes as much about the futures as the past, for our natural disasters are increasingly man-made, and we need more than ever this reminder of universal impermanence and the marks of memory we leave in its wake." — Mary Ruefle

"A tragic travelogue to the underworld-turned-world that recasts a newly lost Italian past with a climate-wise chorus straight out of the most harrowing Greek drama." — Joshua Cohen

"A lyrical, meticulous inquiry into the alchemy of memory." — Kirkus Reviews

Esther Kinsky is the author of six volumes of poetry and four novels, most recently Grove, which won the 2018 Leipzig Book Fair Prize. A prolific translator, Kinsky has translated many notable English and Polish writers into German, including John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, and Olga Tokarczuk. Her novel River was longlisted for the German Book Prize in 2014.

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. She lives in Berlin.