Winner of Germany's 2018 Leipzig Book Prize, this novel follows an unnamed narrator, recently bereaved, as she travels to a small village southeast of Rome. Seeing, describing, and naming the world around her is her way of redefining her place within it.
We are guided through the mind and experiences of an unnamed narrator who suddenly finds herself in a terrain comprised of numerous thresholds ... Throughout Grove, the natural environment serves as a catalyst for memory that allows the narrator to continue her work of mourning ... [The novel demonstrates] that the many turns and returns of memory can become part of a "path" to "be on"—that, in other words, it is possible to move ahead precisely by circling back.
What makes Grove so noteworthy is the keening, perfectly weighted clarity of Kinsky’s prose; Caroline Schmidt’s elegantly considered translation is meticulous but never overstated ... Grove is a story of an existence stilled by loss, but the promise of life, and with it renewal and hope, pulses gently but steadily at its heart.
Poetic and painterly, a meticulously observed contemplation of the world that was, the world that is, and the world that might have been and the boundaries that join and define them ... A philosophical jewel seeking revelation in interstices, absences, ruptures, and the passages between existence and memory.
