ROMBO

Rooted in historical events, destruction, loss, and renewal endure on both the human and geological scales.

In May 1976, in the mountainous region of northeastern Italy home to descendants of Slavic peoples who had crossed the Julian Alps centuries before, an earthquake destroyed homes, killed almost 1,000 people, and leveled entire towns. As she did with the countryside outside Rome in her previous novel, Grove (2020), Kinsky painstakingly depicts the landscape in precise, understated prose, elegantly re-created in English by Schmidt. Technical and scientific description mingles with history, folklore, phenomena, ephemera, and the area's particular culture to sculpt the region in miniature, and the author's choices of where to alight, apposing the bucolic and the—sometimes violently—geological, conjure an uneasiness reminiscent of the restless mountain fault that split the earth. Folding in the human element of the story are the rotating accounts of seven now-adult survivors whose memories and theories weave through the narration and survey of the land. The "deep, unfamiliar, tremendous rumble [that] seems to go on for minutes before the actual quake begins" and which seems to come from inside the mountains themselves is known as the rombo and was etched deeply within the young residents. There are many similarities in their experiences, though they are distinguished by differences in their familial structures and circumstances, and the random chance of how the quake manifested in their homes and lives and how it has since settled in their memories, resulting in a prismatic examination of the event filtered through multiple perspectives. The collective efforts to survive and rebuild after the disaster deepen the sense of the area's untamable remoteness, which in turn underscores its ties and conflicts and the precarity of its people, its very land, and everything that subsists on the thin mountain soil.

A lyrical, meticulous inquiry into the alchemy of memory.