A cathartic leak of a novel, a beautiful bummer, and the floodgates open early ... If Kairos were only a tear-jerker, there might not be much more to say about it. But Erpenbeck, a German writer born in 1967 whose work has come sharply to the attention of English-language readers over the past decade, is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have. Clinging to the undercarriage of her sentences, like fugitives, are intimations of Germany’s politics, history and cultural memory ... She is writing more closely to her own unconscious ... I don’t generally read the books I review twice, but this one I did ... Profound and moving.
...one of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have ever read ... Kairos is the apotheosis of this endeavor to fuse the personal and the political, as our two lovers experience and sometimes seem to embody the political reality of East Germany at the end of the communist dream. The relationship finds wider echoes in that country’s lost ideals and its insistence on holding on to the past long after its inhabitants know they must move on ... Throughout these personal and political journeys, Erpenbeck never reaches for the stock phrase or the known response. While the novel is indeed bleak in its view of love and politics, spending time with Erpenbeck’s rigorous and uncompromising imagination is invigorating all the way to the final page.
An agile translation .. This transition between voices, between worldviews laid out in parallel, is handled brilliantly by Ms. Erpenbeck throughout. It is used to generate light comedy, suspense, friction, pathos ... Ms. Erpenbeck is a subtle, slippery author, and her characters, like her novels, are...complex ... The allegory for totalitarianism may seem blunt but Ms. Erpenbeck encourages multiple readings ... Kairos is about many other things too—music and writing and art and contingency, self-actualization and self-doubt. It resists straightforward interpretation. It resists fixity in place, or time.
Slippery, assured ... Erpenbeck doesn’t reduce their romance to mere allegory. She makes the past feel vital and alive, narrating it all in a loose, fluid, present-tense style that often interweaves Katharina’s thoughts with those of Hans, presenting their dialogues as long, unbroken sentences, the better to highlight their collaborative quality ... Frequently reads like a collage, braiding together art and history and music ... Erpenbeck presents the intimate and the momentous with equal emphasis, so that personal and historical time run on nearly parallel tracks, until they have no choice but to converge ... She has made the past seem like the present.
Beautifully translated by Michael Hofmann, the novel provides an intimate account of Katharina’s obsessive, transgressive passion ... Erpenbeck writes masterfully about time: days, weeks, and years stretch or collapse ... The arc of Kairos is that of Katharina and Hans’s ultimately doomed love, but it is also—how could it not be, written by Erpenbeck?—about the unraveling of the German Democratic Republic.
Her most directly personal ... In the stifling world of Kairos, passion and intimacy are entangled with self-abasement and suspicion, and history crowds its way in too ... Erpenbeck also dramatizes the collision of East and West ... There is no narrative neatness here, no methodical sifting of all this dirt. What these American works do, what Erpenbeck does so well, is instead make room for a history that can’t be reckoned with—a too-tidy phrase—but needs to be recognized and stirred up again and again.
The book bears with it, as so startlingly few novels seem to when you encounter one that does, the absolute urgency of existential questions. Questions that encompass both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of S&M ... Erpenbeck writes Kairos in a skillfully volleying point of view that subsumes the perspectives of both its leads. It’s a way of showing their love dynamically, not as he-said, she-said, or he-thought, she-thought, but they-felt — a hybrid consciousness ... In truth, the book’s central character is neither of the rather thinly drawn leads, but Erpenbeck’s mind, which patrols the borders of bourgeois assumption like a crossing agent, invoking Hölderlin, Gorky, Bukharin, Mozart and Brecht, wrestling with love and time.
Engrossing ... Erpenbeck has an unsurpassed gift for showing how our ideas, passions and choices are shaped – and reshaped – by passing time and the ceaseless transformations of history ... It's this wider sense of life that Erpenbeck offers in Kairos, which, in Michael Hofmann's crystalline translation, pulses with her memories of communist Berlin ... Along the way, Erpenbeck provides the richest portrait I've read of what happened to East Germans when their glumly repressive communist state was replaced overnight by a cocky, shopping-mad West Germany that instantly set about erasing the reality they knew.
What is past, what is present, and what persists are questions that haunt Kairos, a novel concerned with continuity in politics and culture but also with passion and character ... Erpenbeck's spare style, seamlessly blending dialogue, thought, narrative and allusions to German culture, echoes the ideas that animate Kairos, and occasionally the disorientation at its core.
Erpenbeck is frequently named on lists of Nobel Prize contenders and, for newcomers to her work, Kairos easily demonstrates why. Its mix of intimacy and historical sweep is astounding. So is its prose. In poet and translator Michael Hofmann's rigorous translation, Kairos' writing feels purified, as if any emotional irrelevancy had been burned out. As a result, it is devastating. In one scene, Hans and Katharina have sex to the sound of an East German May Day parade, embarking on a 'private emigration on the narrow bed.' In that moment, Katharina's departure seems all but foretold — and yet who has not experienced intimacy as a radical private departure? Here and throughout, Kairos is a voyage far from the familiar, and toward the limits of what a novel can do.
Enthralling and intricate ... Erpenbeck astutely conveys the affair’s quotidian beats, though its intensity occasionally feels overblown ... Erpenbeck is not a writer who coddles her readers, starting with the coolly dispassionate narrative voice of her fiction, a studied craft that skillfully heightens emotional heft by maintaining tension between what is being conveyed and how it is conveyed ... Even in its silences, this fascinating novel has much to say.
Stylishly translated by Michael Hofmann, this is a finely calibrated book ... Observation, too, is a recurring theme, whether with regard to pleasure or control.
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His sadism and her continued acceptance of his abuse make for uncomfortable reading. Their power dynamic serves as a political metaphor, with the early days of the affair suggesting the halcyon days before the corruption of socialist ideals ... Effectively captures the generational divide in Germany at the time of reunification ... Michael Hofmann, a poet and sharp-tongued literary critic, is a prolific translator from German. While his rendition of Kairos is mostly smooth, at times even James Salter-esque, I found myself missing the voice of Susan Bernofsky, who had translated Erpenbeck’s previous novels ... The translation hits some false notes ... The end of the affair is a clever analogue for the demise of the socialist experiment.
There is considerable Ostalgia in Kairos, but it is of a grown-up kind, neither naively glorifying nor vilifying what was. Its characters having progressed from idealism through the horrors of disenchantment, and arrived at a synthesis in which the previous stages have been properly worked through, the novel is perhaps best described as post-tragic in spirit ... Erpenbeck’s portrayal of both Hans and the dying GDR emphasizes the troubling coexistence of a grander social vision and totalitarianism. As the relationship between the lovers darkens, Hans becomes more deplorable but also elicits our pity ... The big changes are crucial, of course, but Erpenbeck is equally interested in smaller, preparatory tremors ... Erpenbeck invites us to appreciate the chiaroscuro, to look more discerningly at the many nuanced shades of good and bad that were at work in the German Democratic Republic.
We might assume a contemporary novel will upend the convention: give voice to the younger woman, or reveal romance as exploitation—abuse, even. Erpenbeck is up to something less predictable … This is a book about a decisive moment in these small lives, but it’s also a novel about a moment in history … We assume age difference means power discrepancy, but in fact Hans and Katharina are well-matched. What is to come for these two bolsters Hans’s assertion that love and hate are closely related … Kairos does not condemn Hans for this violence; it does not posit Katharina’s submission to her lover as abuse. It’s a clear-eyed book, morally neutral and the more interesting for it ... I don’t know what a national process of political reconciliation might look like, in Germany or in the United States, where there’s plenty of atonement to be done. Erpenbeck, however, might already be working in pursuit of that. ‘Is it the case here,’ the author wonders, ‘that day after day, silently, people come to an understanding of their own lives by way of the understandings of others?’ To me, that sounds like the project of fiction itself.”
Erpenbeck proves the impossibility, irresponsibility even, of an easy binary and reminds us that the only thing we can be certain of is an ending that will bring along change.
Like all the best allegories, Kairos cannot be reduced to a single, unambiguous message. There are too many questions – about the nature of love, about memory and history and truth – and no concrete answers. Plus, from Katharina’s perspective, neither West nor post-reunification Germany offers more real freedom than the GDR; the craven consumerism of capitalist society makes her sick ... But, by and large, that’s a story for another time. Kairos is an autopsy of those broken bonds that you were sure would last forever.
We readers, wise to history and mindful of our own youthful infatuations, immediately recognize that this relationship is doomed. And yet the lovers’ convergence nevertheless feels profound ... Erpenbeck dares us to wonder: Is there a world in which this relationship works out? Could the obstacles, as formidable as the Wall itself, be somehow overcome? ... Kairos does not call out the above historical events, and Erpenbeck is too gifted and too subtle to go for easy parallels. She prefers oblique angles; near-misses fraught with meaning ... Kairos, in its requiem for a bad romance, dares to ask if the losses were inevitable. At a time when many readers grieve governmental failures and related losses—of rights; of optimism—Kairos carries important medicine. Might other modes of living, informed by ideals and desire, still be possible?
...before the politics, she nets you with chemistry. Katharina and Hans narrate their own seduction, their voices sliding past each other in Erpenbeck’s exquisite ink ... Theirs is the kind of passion that bursts open like a soft fruit dropped onto a hard floor, but Erpenbeck makes you believe in it, for they are not just arduous but hesitant and shy ... Erpenbeck is not the first writer to use a romantic relationship to explore a wider political landscape, a trick that can sometimes feel a bit flat. This person is like that place — sure, and what? But Erpenbeck is better: she tells this love story not just to describe the course of history, but to try to understand it ... Under the weight of the GDR’s collapse, the romance creaks a little. Perhaps that’s why Kairos is almost entirely humorless (that you will love it nonetheless is testament to just how good the rest of it is)...Perhaps this is a fault of Michael Hofmann’s otherwise lovely translation, or perhaps (sorry to stereotype) it’s just very German, or perhaps it’s because romance is inherently self-important (it happens to everyone, but it feels like it only happens to you). So what? Not everything is funny. But people tend to find a joke anyway, especially when things fail, and I wish Erpenbeck had shown us that. Instead, in this elegant novel, there are only tears.
A strict allegorical reading can’t do justice to Erpenbeck’s subtle, richly layered, densely allusive and hugely ambitious novel. Palpably real, the lovers are complex and contradictory. Their miseries register on a human scale, as do their joys ... Kairos is an impressive achievement that has deepened my admiration for Erpenbeck’s talent for weaving into her fiction clashes of ideology and convulsions of history. But I have to admit that I respected it more than I liked it. As the punishment meted out by Hans to poor Katharina drags grimly on, I grew impatient for the Wall to fall.
Fittingly for a novel about an all-consuming love affair, Kairos is written in a complex, interleaved style, and like many of Erpenbeck’s novels, it makes use of a slyly omniscient narrator. The playfulness of Erpenbeck’s prose (translated here by Michael Hofmann) is almost musical ... There is give in the syntax, a looseness that interweaves art and sensation. Erpenbeck’s novels tend to avoid direct dialogue, couching it instead as recollection or otherwise filtering it through a character’s consciousness. The result is a slurring, sliding effect. It’s a prose uniquely suited to capturing the later stages of Hans and Katharina’s affair, which takes a dark turn toward sadomasochism ... Erpenbeck is careful not to make their relationship into an allegory for German reunification, and indeed, reading Kairos, one begins to sense that the love of Hans and Katharina has been falling apart from the moment they met—and that this is nothing to be sad about. Erpenbeck almost wants us to feel it as a relief that the lovers are allowed to go their separate ways. There is serendipity in the relationship’s beginning, and necessity in its ending.
Magnificent ... The alacrity of Erpenbeck’s prose never flags throughout ... If the end of love seems inevitable, its decline and fall proves remarkably suspenseful. Most of the secrets and surprises somehow illuminate larger forces at work, economic or political, yet front and center is the couple’s intimate connection ... While the latter half of Kairos depends on the dismal repetitions of a sick relationship, it never falls into the dreary repetitions of ill-conceived drama.
Erpenbeck climbs in between the reality of things, mapping the subterranean affect of the GDR through its humor, speech, customs, gestures ... Hans and Katharina are symbolically overweighted characters, but I forgive Erpenbeck her ciphers. Her heavy-handedness makes clear distinct experiences in the GDR ... The novel’s most beautiful passages occur in the direct shifts between the lovers.
