December 5, 2022
Named for the Calabrian term for the low rumble that precedes earthquakes, Kinsky’s experimental and somewhat rocky outing follows seven Italians from rural Friuli as they recount their lives before and after two devastating earthquakes. Intercut with asides on local plants, birds, and folklore, the resulting pastiche melds the voices of people, nature, and the earth itself into a single chorus. The result is somewhat unfocused, if brilliantly evocative. Despite the multiperspective narration, the speakers are for the most part indistinguishable; without dialogue or identifiable speaking styles, their first-person accounts of growing up in rural poverty (gathering hay in mountain valleys, absentee parents and partners at work abroad) blend together. Kinsky halts the narrative with meandering descriptions of nearby Mount Canin’s chalky faces; the soft, variable colors of limestone; and the local white mountain garlic. Readers willing to contain their interest in traditional storytelling—and to weather the occasionally repetitive interlude—will savor Kinsky’s poetic and dreamlike scenes: a child lulled to sleep by the sounds of a nearby gravel quarry; young shepherds catching vipers in glass jars. Though it can be tedious, it’s hard to deny the beauty of Kinsky’s elegantly wrought sketchbook of rural life.
February 15, 2023
Rooted in historical events, destruction, loss, and renewal endure on both the human and geological scales. In May 1976, in the mountainous region of northeastern Italy home to descendants of Slavic peoples who had crossed the Julian Alps centuries before, an earthquake destroyed homes, killed almost 1,000 people, and leveled entire towns. As she did with the countryside outside Rome in her previous novel, Grove (2020), Kinsky painstakingly depicts the landscape in precise, understated prose, elegantly re-created in English by Schmidt. Technical and scientific description mingles with history, folklore, phenomena, ephemera, and the area's particular culture to sculpt the region in miniature, and the author's choices of where to alight, apposing the bucolic and the--sometimes violently--geological, conjure an uneasiness reminiscent of the restless mountain fault that split the earth. Folding in the human element of the story are the rotating accounts of seven now-adult survivors whose memories and theories weave through the narration and survey of the land. The "deep, unfamiliar, tremendous rumble [that] seems to go on for minutes before the actual quake begins" and which seems to come from inside the mountains themselves is known as the rombo and was etched deeply within the young residents. There are many similarities in their experiences, though they are distinguished by differences in their familial structures and circumstances, and the random chance of how the quake manifested in their homes and lives and how it has since settled in their memories, resulting in a prismatic examination of the event filtered through multiple perspectives. The collective efforts to survive and rebuild after the disaster deepen the sense of the area's untamable remoteness, which in turn underscores its ties and conflicts and the precarity of its people, its very land, and everything that subsists on the thin mountain soil. A lyrical, meticulous inquiry into the alchemy of memory.
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