Profoundly empathetic, and austere – a minor-key exploration of landscape and land.

Grove is a novel in three parts, each of them concerned with a different journey in a different Italy.

In the first part, the narrator, recently bereaved, travels to a small village south-east of Rome. It is winter, and from her temporary residence on a hill between village and cemetery she embarks on walks and brief outings, exploring the banal and the sublime with equal dedication and intensity. Her perception is coloured by bereavement and the need to process her loss, but also by a profound curiosity in the details that make up the life around her and the way they refer to the many places of the dead, from the local cemetery to the ancient Etruscan tombs on the coast. Gazing, seeing, describing, naming the world around her is her way of redefining her place in this world.

The second part of the novel takes us to 70s Italy, where the narrator often visited as a child, with her father. Fragmented impressions and memories – of Communist party rallies, roadside restaurants, film sequences, birdlife, and the ubiquitous Etruscan necropoli – combine into a peculiar mosaic of a bygone era which at the same time forms the backdrop for the rest of the novel which is set in the present.

The third part is set in Northern Italy, between Ferrara and the Po estuary, some years after the bereavement. The vast flat landscape of the Bassa Padana unfolds in front of the reader, part water, part land, dominated by a variety of birds which seem to have become the narrator’s favoured companions on her walks, and watch over the vanished necropolis of Spina in the delta region. This last part is pervaded by a sense of reconciliation with loss, but also by a new kind of curiosity in contemporary Italy and the continuous silent presence of bereavement in the shape of helpless, homeless refugees, wandering the streets of sleepy villages and little towns.

Esther Kinsky’s travels and forays – both in the present and in the remembered past – are Italian Journeys of a unique kind. Appealing to all senses, they explore external terrain and yet, they take the reader inwards, to potential closure for grief and to islands of solace. The travelling, wandering narrator’s gaze elicits from each landscape the beauty that arises from engagement with every detail, however insignificant it may initially seem.

Slates