Esther Kinsky Rombo
[Rombo]

‘Rombo’ is an old Italian word for the characteristic noises that presage an earthquake. Esther Kinsky, who has lived in some pretty remote and lonely corners of Hungary and Italy, chose this mysterious-sounding title chiefly in order to indicate that her book is not solely about the actual, physical earthquakes that she describes. The rumbling noises appear to emanate from a frightening inner realm beneath the surface of the earth. They are alien, threatening and beyond our ken, and make us instantly aware of unexpected existential dimensions. The book creates unusual tensions, far removed from conventional plot-lines and narrative strategies. Its departure point is the earthquake of 6 May 1976 that hit the Friuli area of north-eastern Italy  -  the point where Italy, Austria and Slovenia all come together  -  and also the follow-up earthquake that occurred in September the same year. The writer concentrates her attention chiefly on one particular village in the Val Canale that was badly affected, and from there goes on to build a large-scale geographical, social and  -  not least  -  aesthetic panorama.

The prose here is extremely intense and poetic. It evokes in great detail the specific peculiarities of the terrain - a valley between the Carnic Alps, the Julian Alps and the Karavanks, where the local dialects alternate between Italian and Slovenian. The scientific enumeration of the region’s characteristics, chiefly those of a mineralogical and biological kind, yield an ever-changing picture full of scintillating effects. This does not serve to romanticise the loveliness of the landscape but rather to explain it through its geological data and the variations in its physical substance. And as a result a paradox inevitably begins to appear that never needs to be explicitly spelt out, but which hangs like a fateful pall over the book’s proceedings: this area seems like Paradise  -  but it harbours the constant threat of an earthquake.

Poetry, history and anthropology come together in a highly unusual combination in this book. This is already clear in its carefully chiselled outer form. Short chapters follow close on one another’s heels, with cleverly contrived references both backwards and forwards, and in the process individual villagers and their families gradually begin to fill the foreground. Their personal experiences are evoked in searing detail, but they are also contrasted with objectivising passages that focus specifically on the plant and animal world. In the first part of the book this procedure slowly gives rise to a multiply layered picture of the hours before the earthquake. A particularly powerful motif here is the black carbon-snake, a feature endemic in this valley which the local people endow with many attributes and consider obscurely portentous.

The earthquake itself, which occurred at around 9 p.m., is described from the point of view of a handful of local residents, and, as the narrative unfolds, their family circumstances, relationships and social positions become ever more distinct. Their poverty and vulnerability, and the fateful forces that dominate their lives, are demonstrated by means of numerous specific, highly charged motifs, such as the rituals followed in everyday life and on festal occasions. The legend of the ‘Riba Faronika’, or Pharaonic Fish  -  the mermaid with two tails  -  is especially striking, as are the local songs of the region, which are ‘neither sad nor cheerful’, but rather ‘plaintive yet devoid of passion’. An archaic community grounded in fatalism  -  portrayed here by the author through exceptionally vibrant and often lyrical imagery  -  finds itself confronted by natural processes that human beings can do nothing to change: the ‘susurrations of brute matter’.

In this book limestone, particular birds, particular colours characteristic of this landscape and the sky above it, are brought into conjunction with huge questions about humanity and community. The political factor in this embattled border area  -  ‘the partisans arrived from two different directions’  -  is always present in the background. This outstanding and highly poetic work is not so much a German book as a richly faceted European one.