The winter is harsh, the small Italian towns south-east of Rome closed and somewhat unwelcoming. Not the most obvious place, perhaps, for the unnamed German narrator in Grove to retreat after the loss of her beloved “M”. But it is a trip she feels obliged to take, and on her first night alone in Olevano she lies awake, “contemplating how, for the next three months, to force my life into a new order that would let me survive the unexpected unknown”.
Published in German in 2018 and now translated by Caroline Schmidt, Groveoperates in that fertile ground between fiction and memoir – Esther Kinsky’s husband Martin died in 2014 – and is a three-part chronicle of grief and memory with recurring motifs of cemeteries, droning trucks and landscapes obscured by cloud or fog.
The second phase of the book sees the narrator, unhinged by the death many years earlier of her father, recall travels to Italy with her family in the 70s, triggering another series of elegant, precise reflections on the nature and purpose of memory.
Finally, we are back in the present day, in northern Italy, walking along deserted canals and revelling in cinematic, abandoned seaside resorts.
These three contrasting journeys in different Italys, returned to by the narrator to find peace, familiarity and refuge, also work as a way in which she can process not just grief, but isolation and her new identity. Italy is less a blank canvas than a fulcrum, in its varied landscapes and peoples, for understanding her place in the world.
By the end, in Ravenna, the narrator finds two related mosaics of a maritime scene her father once admired. This “whispering of countless small, gold-dusted stones” speaks to her of “life, light and the open air”. And in that one line of power and grace, you know our narrator will be fine.
Grove is a close companion to Kinsky’s previous book, River, which explored London’s Lea Valley and found similar consolations in the weather, landscape and outsider experience. The language and atmosphere is again redolent of Kinsky’s compatriot WG Sebald, the much-missed psychogeographer. With Grove, she has reached his level. This is a book that finds a kind of comfort in the transience of being human.
Grove by Esther Kinsky is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£14.99)
