Seeing Further

In this autobiographical novel by a leading German author and translator, the narrator attempts to revive a run-down Hungarian movie theater—an unpromising endeavor that soon leads into a consideration of the building’s history and an homage to the power of the cinema, imperiled as it may be in our time.

While travelling through the Great Alföld, the vast plain in southeastern Hungary, the narrator of Seeing Further stops in an all but vacant town near the Romanian border. There she happens ...