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Kairos

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Kairos

By: Jenny Erpenbeck
Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
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WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024

'An ambitious story of love and betrayal' - Irish Times
'The ending is like a bomb thrown into your room -- you'll be reeling for days and weeks to come.' - Neel Mukherjee

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fueled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.

From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.

©2023 Jenny Erpenbeck (P)2023 New Directions Publishing Corp. Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction World Literature
All stars
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Eloquent story of an East German couple struggling and failing to possess each other. Set in GDR as it reaches its dissolution. Fascinating. Replete with lies, hypocrisy, self-deception, self-delusion and ideological cant and control. some of the finest writing I’ve ever read. 💕

Politics made personal: a refined psychological drama 🎭

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This is a challenging novel. I can’t say that I “enjoyed” it, but my word I respect it. If "Go, Went, Gone" made me want to go out and change the world, "Kairos" made me want to crawl into a dark room and process the wreckage of one. Bleak and beautiful, it’s a gut-wrenching, artistically brilliant take on lost love playing out against the slow death of a political regime. Mandatory reading for masochists and literature students.

It’s not a romance, it’s an autopsy. From page one you can feel the disillusionment baked into the bones of the story. Nineteen-year-old Katharina falls for Hans, a fifty-three-year-old married writer older than her father, and what follows isn’t so much a relationship as a prolonged collapse. The affair rots from the inside out, just like the GDR that frames it. By the time the Wall comes down, so do they.

I’m calling it: this is a literary masterpiece of fusion. Erpenbeck has absolutely smashed the difficult trick of turning the personal and political into one seamless thing. The parallels between Katharina’s abasement and East Germany’s decay are never laboured, just hauntingly inevitable. That Brecht/ Stalin analogy she drops is a knockout; so sharp it could open a vein.

The power is in the prose. Michael Hofmann’s translation gives it this clipped, suffocating immediacy that feels like being locked in a small, overheated flat with both lovers arguing. The present tense traps you inside their claustrophobic orbit, every gesture and humiliation rendered with forensic precision. I’ve got massive respect for any writer who can take a technique that often deadens emotion and make it pulse like this.

Then there’s the unflinching tone. Erpenbeck’s imagination is rigorous, unyielding, never reaching for comfort. She refuses to write toward the reader’s expectation, and I’ve got all the time in the world for that. It’s what makes her work feel alive, and in this case, terrifyingly so.

The political layering is nothing short of brilliant. The real betrayal here isn’t Katharina’s; it’s Hans’s, over and over again. He betrays his wife, his son, his lovers, and ultimately himself; trading scraps of loyalty for the state’s favour, the way others might barter cigarettes. By the epilogue, that moral rot is complete. His supposed ideals are nothing more than camouflage for ego and weakness.

Erpenbeck ties that personal corrosion to the wider collapse of East Germany with devastating precision. The fall of the Wall brings no clean redemption, only the sight of the West rushing in with its own hollow certainties. There’s one scene of Hans trudging through a supermarket, hunting for frozen kale, that captures the whole absurd tragedy; the revolution reduced to convenience food.

Still, I never fully bought the affair. I’m just not convinced a bright nineteen-year-old would fall for a pompous older man who records hours of cassette lectures to berate her. The abuse dynamic - emotional blackmail, gaslighting, and Hans’s sickly attempts at control - is deliberate and thematically rich, but it makes for hard reading. You feel complicit just sitting with it.

The later chapters drag. The energy flags as history overtakes them, and I started feeling like I was marking time until the final reckoning. That said, the structural choices - unpunctuated voices, the blurred mid-scene shifts - are genius. They capture the way identities dissolve under pressure. It’s messy, intimate, and precise all at once.

What lingers most is how the novel captures the dislocation of Die Wende. The instant worthlessness of Hans’s generation made obsolete overnight. The loss of purpose, the quiet terror of freedom. For those of us who once believed the GDR offered a genuine alternative - and you're looking at a bloke who used to pick them in every C64 sports game - the sadness hits hard. A dream dies, and Erpenbeck makes you feel every cold, bureaucratic second of it.

Bleak, beautiful, and unrelenting. "Kairos" isn’t here to seduce; it’s here to dissect. Four stars, and I’ll need a stiff drink before I ever read it again.

A challenging gem!

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Don't know why this won the international booker prize, I saw somewhere it's supposed to be an allegory for east vs west but omg what a boring story about 2 protagonists who have no redeeming features. The teen woman is just stupid & young. But the middle aged man whose a decade older than her own father is dull, boorish, self absorbed, a serial cheater, petty, jealous, a married man who has no intention of leaving his wife, in fact he's a dirty old selfish man with no redeeming features and is proof that old fellas going out with teens just hold them back. He clingy, whiney, whinging, self obsessed, reprehensible, and a grudging, covetous, bitter asshat. And predictably she becomes bi-sexual. Yawn, yawn, yawn. Am sorry I persevered!

Sorry I preserved

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On and on and on and going nowhere. Immeasurably boring. It had been so well-received…

I’m couldn’t get through this

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Something was lost in translation for me for this one. I would have returned this book had I not already unsubscribed from Audible.

So tedious

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