Kairos tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after.
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.
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.
