1 1

Seeing Further

Seeing Further

by Esther Kinsky, translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt

$17.95
$17.95
Available as E-Book German Literature
Format
This title can be purchased from your favorite e-book retailer,
including  many independent booksellers.

Buy on Amazon   Buy on iBooks   Buy on Barnes&Noble

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.

Additional Book Information

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9781681378510
Pages: 224
Publication Date:

Praise

Seeing Further is an elegy for the shared space of the cinema and the promise of a collective waking dream, a profound and melancholy meditation on the shift from public to private viewing that is itself a visionary feat. Esther Kinsky’s narrator is both camera and projector, capturing and transmitting haunting images of daily life in the endless expanse of the Hungarian lowlands, where past and present dissolve into one another as people wait for a future that never arrives. It is a novel saturated with loss and mystery, and a profound reckoning with the historical forces and material conditions that have forever altered the terms of how we see.
—Christine Smallwood

This fixation with ‘the how of seeing’ allows Kinsky to show off her fine-tuned skills as a cultural theorist, with flashes of essayistic brilliance running through the narrative as she tries to tease out the essential, elusive charm of the cinema.
—Lou Selfridge, Frieze

Kinsky (Rombo) delivers a discursive paean to the transformative power of cinema...Cinephiles and W.G. Sebald fans alike will devour this passion project.
—Publishers Weekly

Sorrow bleeds through... the decline of cinema epitomizing profound loss.
—Kirkus Reviews

Esther Kinsky has created a literary oeuvre of impressive stylistic brilliance, thematic diversity and stubborn originality... Far from 'eco-dreaming' without sorrow or critique, Kinsky's novels and poems position humanity in relation to the ruins it has produced and what still remains of nature.
—2022 Kleist Prize jury

According to Kinsky, cinema was a place of refuge, ‘a shelter with a view’ where one could see further than one’s immediate surroundings and into a vast ‘scope of possibilities’. … But if this book is about broader horizons, it is equally about developing a practice of looking closely.
— Yuwen Jiang Art Review

But cinephiles and nostalgists are going to feel at home in this book
—Sam Sacks The Wall Street Journal

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it