Goethe is always possible, but Brecht was perhaps never as close as after this new novel by Esther Kinsky.

There is not much to oppose the old master with his "Because nature is insensitive / Is nature: / The sun shines / About evil and good / And the criminal / Shines like the best / The moon and the stars", but the modern poet pushes forward now, not very noble, but possibly helpful, and grumbles: more human!

Sequentially.

In May and September 1976 earthquakes in Friuli destroy entire towns and hundreds of people die.

Kinsky's novel Rombo is named after the sound that precedes this tremor.

It begins with an Italian quote from Dante's "Divine Comedy", which has no reference to the translation at the end, then omissions on scientific topics alternate with the observations of a virtually omniscient person who describes the country and its people.

The individual fragments are quite short.

None of this is new in Kinsky's work, one can think of the award-winning off-road novel "Hain" or the collection of poems "Schiefern".

But the same applies to every work:

You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

And here the first, initial impression is bad.

The language meanders behind nature, someone knows how she feels.

"Entering the moraine landscape from the mountains, the river bends from its course east to south and takes in the fella from the north, hesitant, undecided both turquoise and white, undecided has created a huge triangular field of pebbles and gravel separating the Carnic Alps from the Julian Prealps, a bright expanse like Versehrung, a space of hesitation against the backdrop of mountain valleys, against the isolated zones with their own languages ​​deadened by dwindling use, their shrill, helpless songs and their intricate dances.” In the case of continental plates, which "are not well the way they are," it comes down to personal

Folklore is there a lot

This is followed by a piece entitled "Anselmo", which introduces this same old man.

"He likes to involve visitors to the grave in chats and offers himself up as a person of trust to the bereaved from outside." Limestone is made to burn, felled wood is led down into the valley.” A network of tracks, on the other hand, “leads around gorges and looks for fords”.

Only after about a quarter of the novel does Kinsky allow her characters the first-person perspective.

The stories they then tell are fragile;

occasionally it shimmers through that some were friends or relatives, but most of them remain keywords: Italian and Slovenian partisans, labor migration,

Dreams, divorces, language.

The folklore is illuminated most clearly.

They can't make up for the impression they made at the beginning, but what matters is their randomness: the souvenir finds do not mean a change of perspective and do not add up to a whole.

Dropping one would only change the scope of the text.