
Esther Kinsky, River, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018.
Esther Kinsky's RIVER is a novel that follows a young woman's memories of her past through reminiscences brought about by her walks alongside the rivers that she encountered over the course of her life. RIVER was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2014.
`After many years I had excised myself from the life I had led in town, just as one might cut a figure out of a landscape or group photo. Abashed by the harm I had wreaked on the picture left behind, and unsure where the cut-out might end up next, I lived a provisional existence. I did so in a place where I knew none of my neighbours, where the street names, views, smells and faces were all unfamiliar to me, in a cheaply appointed flat where I would be able to lay my life aside.'
In RIVER, a woman moves to a London suburb for reasons that are unclear. She takes long, solitary walks by the River Lea, observing and describing her surroundings and the unusual characters she encounters. Over the course of these wanderings she amasses a collection of found objects and photographs and is drawn into reminiscences of the different rivers which haunted the various stages of her life, from the Rhine, where she grew up, to the Saint Lawrence, the Hooghly, and the banks of the Oder. Written in language that is as precise as it is limpid, RIVER is a remarkable novel, full of poignant images and poetic observations, an ode to nature, edgelands, and the transience of all things human.

Esther Kinsky, Summer Resort, Trans. by Martin Chalmers, Seagull Books, 2011.
"Summer Resort", the first novel by noted translator Esther Kinsky, is set in a village somewhere on the endless Hungarian plain. It is the hottest summer in memory, and everyone in the village dreams of the sweet life in Udulo, a summer resort on a river. The characters that populate "Summer Resort" tell stories - comic, tragic, or both - of life in rural Hungary. Tales of onion kings and melon pickers, of scrapyards and sugar beet factories, paint a vivid and human picture of their world. In the course of the novel, the storytellers' paths intersect at the summer resort with the bar owner Lacibacsi, the Kozak Boys and their fat and pale wives, and the builder Antal, who introduces a mysterious new woman to the inhabitants of the resort. The stranger disrupts their otherwise staid summer routines - with surprising, unpredictable consequences. Now available for the first time in English, "Summer Resort" brings to a new audience one of the most distinctive emerging voices in recent German writing.
In her native Germany, Summer Resort (published as Sommerfrische) was the novel that propelled Esther Kinsky - then known for her work as a translator - to literary fame with critics citing her intrinsically poetic use of language to convey the atmosphere of her settings. Summer Resort may rest lightly in one's hands at barely over 100 pages, but the weight of its implications require much more attention from the reader.
The summer in which the novella takes place is one of searing, bone-dry heat enveloping a small Hungarian village on the plains. "Everyone remembers the year of the heat" is how the first chapter opens, and Kinsky proceeds to show how well everyone does, through an intricate interplay of elaborate physical detail with its deeper ramifications. The heat "which penetrated the skull before one knew it" soon entails more than the physical discomfort of the village's residents. Each chapter holds a microcosm of unspoken restlessness that permeates the descriptions of dying dogs and watermelons smashed on the road. This is a rare gem of a book full of lightly veiled complexity. - Noori Passela
https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/summer-resort-dying-dogs-and-smashed-watermelons-1.458312
Oppressive would certainly be the best word to describe Esther Kinsky's world. Oppressive, hot, sticky, dusty, and incapable of getting itself out of the mud. Any attempt at beauty is promptly shredded until all that is left are traces of bleak, sweltering reality. Kinsky wants her reader to feel the heat in this book, which takes place in the middle of the hottest Hungarian summer in remembrance. Add to that fact that the village in question is seemingly sequestered from any sense of civilization or culture that would usually breathe life into what should be a quaint town. Instead, the village seems to consist only of a brothel, a run down bar and a few parched fields surrounded by railroad tracks. The only glimmer of hope is a single summer resort near the river, attempting to live up its reputation as the symbol of a normal summer.
But even the resort, or üdulo as it is called, has been beaten down by Kinsky's thesaurus, each additional word sucking out any attempt at a happy time. The text is as bogged down by her adjectives as the semi stream-of-consciousness technique she uses, but not in a manner that is detrimental to the text.
The reader feels like they have been thrust into the work, gasping to find a place amidst the other characters, characters so lost that they do what they can to make it to the next day, grasping at what they can reach. For the men, this consists of a guzzle of beer at the local bar after working in the fields, followed by a strut at the brothel, trying to escape their wives who are most often described as masses of flesh, who provide nothing more than presence in a bed used only to straighten out weary bodies. It becomes too difficult to feel anymore; even readers must keep their minds open lest they miss out on an affair, a stroke, a death. The heat, and Kinsky herself, masks even these seemingly important events in the lives of the Onion Men, The Kozak Boys, the New Woman, and the Antal of this town; no one has any energy to even properly react.
Their lives become moments; moments in a brutal summer to help pass the time until September and the cooler weather can settle in. Until then, the characters continue to live their disparate lives, occasionally providing their narrative voice, but never really understanding what it is that brought them to that town and that life. One can only hope that a fresh drizzle of rain will be able to rinse their minds and bodies, but under Kinsky's hand, it is more likely that the characters' lives will just fade into the heat, becoming dust easily swept off the resort porch and forgotten. - C. LaRiviere http://www.belletrista.com/2011/Issue14/reviews_12.php
Esther Kinsky was born in 1956 in Engelskirchen, near Bonn. There she studied both Slavic and English Language and Literature, and has worked since 1986 as a translator of literary texts from Polish, Russian and English. Writers Kinsky has translated include Hanna Krall, Zygmunt Haupt, Aleksander Wat, Magdalena Tulli and Olga Tokarczuk. In addition to her translations, Kinsky has also published her own poetry and short prose texts in diverse literary journals in England, where she lived for many years. The breakthrough for her own work came in 2009 with her first novel »Sommerfrische« (tr: Summer Resort). Since then she has been acknowledged as a literary discovery, in addition to her far-reaching recognition as a literary translator. Kinsky's début was written with the support of a grant from the Robert-Bosch-Foundation, which made research travels in the border regions of Hungary, Romania and Serbia possible. »Sommerfrische« tells the story of a woman who »intrudes« as a stranger into the everyday life of a Hungarian village. The events which the woman and individual villagers experience are embedded in detailed and lyrical still lifes and landscape descriptions. »Kinsky […] sings of this terra incognito in a language which is as inventive as it is beguiling« (»Neue Bücher«, NDR). Two further works have been published which also draw on the author's impressions during her journeys through the south-east European countries: the poetry collection »die ungerührte schrift des jahrs« (tr: The unaffected writing of the year), in which she returns to the world of her first novel, and a novel, »Banatsko«, which will be published in 2011. In 2002 Esther Kinsky received, together with Olga Tokarczuk, the Brücke-Berlin-Prize. In 2009 Kinsky won the Paul-Celan-Prize for her work as a translator, with special attention given her translation of Tokarczuk's novel »Unrast« (tr: Unrest). The author lives in Berlin and Battonya, one of the Hungarian towns she had visited on the border to Romania.