Seeing Further

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.” —Publisher’s 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