Name: Kairos
Rating: 3.475 (20 reviews)
ISBN: 9783328600855

Jenny Erpenbeck

Roman

Kairos

Adored the prose. Couldn't find myself engaging with the text. . there were too many references (which, I guess is the whole point) that I had to constantly look up. 

I’m sure if I reread within the next decade with expanded knowledge of German history, it’ll resonate heavier.

vied angelo

Adored the prose. Couldn't find myself engaging with the text. . there were too many references (which, I guess is the whole point) that I had to constantly look up. 

I’m sure if I reread within the next decade with expanded knowledge of German history, it’ll resonate heavier.

Michael Hofmann

Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation ) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos―an unforgettably compelling masterpiece―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. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: “The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck’s work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies.” In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on his work as a translator: “Hofmann’s translation is invaluable―it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once ‘loyal’ and ‘beautiful.’”

it was so hard to read that i had to turn on the audiobook for the first time. u can call me a masochist

SONYA

This is great literary fiction but I am not sure I was entirely convinced by it.

I loved the prose; I liked all the little tricks it pulled on us, weaving the different points of view seamlessly and using punctuation to vary speed and rhythm. I thought it worked very well to represent that sense of being out of time, of limbo that people in abusive relationships long-overstayed their welcome and that people in the last years of the Soviet regime must have felt.

I also thought it achieved a very good balance between showing life in East Germany, under communism as it existed there and then, and the disappointment of the capitalist democratic reality, without being judgemental or overly fond of either.

But where I am thorn is the relationship as a metaphor for GDR and the USSR - and that is a pretty central element of the novel. It just feels too on-the-nose for novel that feels like it should be much more intelligent than this. Perhaps it is just very pretentious and I am falling for its tricks or maybe I am greatly overestimating the intelligence of the average reader (if this novel is targetting them at all) but this is the sense I am left with by the end of reading it. I usually get very excited when literary techniques are utilised and expanded like this but this time, it just felt like oversimplifying what could be a very impactful novel.

This is great literary fiction but I am not sure I was entirely convinced by it.

I loved the prose; I liked all the little tricks it pulled on us, weaving the different points of view seamlessly and using punctuation to vary speed and rhythm. I thought it worked very well to represent that sense of being out of time, of limbo that people in abusive relationships long-overstayed their welcome and that people in the last years of the Soviet regime must have felt.

I also thought it achieved a very good balance between showing life in East Germany, under communism as it existed there and then, and the disappointment of the capitalist democratic reality, without being judgemental or overly fond of either.

But where I am thorn is the relationship as a metaphor for GDR and the USSR - and that is a pretty central element of the novel. It just feels too on-the-nose for novel that feels like it should be much more intelligent than this. Perhaps it is just very pretentious and I am falling for its tricks or maybe I am greatly overestimating the intelligence of the average reader (if this novel is targetting them at all) but this is the sense I am left with by the end of reading it. I usually get very excited when literary techniques are utilised and expanded like this but this time, it just felt like oversimplifying what could be a very impactful novel.

Kairos Roman

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