Seeing Further [Paperback]

In this autobiographical novel by a leading German author and translator, the narrator attempts to revive a run-down Hungarian movie theater—an unpromising endeavor that soon leads into a consideration of the building’s history and an homage to the power of the cinema, imperiled as it may be in our time.

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. Brilliantly translated by Kin and Hennessy, this captivating collection from Ukrainian poet Andrukhovych is animated by local legend, regional history, and personal recollection....Wide-ranging and representative of Andrukhovych’s many strengths, this is a valuable English-language introduction to an important poet. —Publishers Weekly

“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 lowlandlCN