Mente et malleo, or How Sound Matters: Non-human Voices in Esther Kinsky’s Rombo

When considering the amount of damage caused by natural catastrophes, the discourse is usually dominated by the effects on anthropic life only. However, the involved actants are a multitude, and just a part of them is human. In her novel Rombo (2022), Esther Kinsky portrays the life of a rural community during and after a series of seismic episodes that occurred in Northern Italy in May and September 1976. Besides describing the environmental changes through human perceptions, stories, and memories, a peculiar nexus of sound and vibration seems to connect every ecological organic and inorganic being. The paper analyses the role that sound and vibration play in building a relational, interspecies response to the catastrophe. In order to do so, it addresses the Lautgelände, indicating the voiced non-human reactions to the earthquake, and the vibroscape, a term we use to represent the vibrations outside of the cochlear domain, which are accessible through foreboding or affective attentiveness.