Seeing Further

On a journey through the south-east of Hungary some years back, Esther Kinsky finds herself in a small town in the Alföld, the Great Hungarian Plain. Resignation and a glorification of the past are the most dominant threads in the inhabitants' conversations. Like many other things, the cinema, 'mozi' in Hungarian, has long since closed. Esther Kinsky's own passion for the cinema moves her to bring the decaying mozi back to life. This book is both an account of her time running the local mozi, and a meditation on the irresistible magic of the cinema, 'a venue where seeing was a collective experience, where wit, terror, dismay and relief found a communal expression without encroaching on the anonymity afforded by the dark room'. Seeing Further is a powerfully eloquent declaration of love to the cinema and the collective experience of watching by Esther Kinsky, one of Germany's most important contemporary writers.

Esther Kinsky grew up by the river Rhine and lived in London for twelve years. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, five novels (Summer Resort, Banatsko, River, Grove, Rombo), numerous essays on language, poetry and translation and three children's books. She has translated many notable English (John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, Iain Sinclair) and Polish (Joanna Bator, Miron Bia?oszewski, Magdalena Tulli) authors into German. Both River and Grove won numerous literary prizes in Germany. Rombo was awarded the newly founded W.-G.-Sebald-Literaturpreis 2020. In 2022, Kinsky was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize for her oeuvre.