Publishers Weekly
02/06/2023
Erpenbeck (Go, Went, Gone) sets the dissolution of a May-December romance against the backdrop of German reunification in her solemn and subtle latest. After a former lover dies in the present day, Katharina receives two boxes of diaries, tapes, and souvenirs that chronicle their relationship from decades earlier. Erpenbeck then flashes back to 1986, when Katharina, as a 19-year-old student in East Berlin, starts an affair with Hans, a married writer. The relationship is intense, physically and emotionally, especially after she admits to a brief fling with a younger man. Now, while listening to Hans’s tapes, Katharina reckons with the depth of Hans’s sexual and psychological control over her life (“So far as I am concerned, your deception is the greatest and most critical defeat of my life,” he says to her on one of the vitriolic recordings). Their relationship is marked by the tension between beginnings and endings, love and hate, truth and deception, freedom and repression. It’s also a struggle of wills between two generations with a very different experience of the crumbling Socialist state. This audacious dissection of unruly forces demonstrates how endings are already present in every personal or political beginning, however promising. (June)
Necessary Fiction - Regan Mies
"In Kairos, Erpenbeck brilliantly uses distortions of memory and distance to elucidate the ways in which history is constantly happening; the future can be made clear if only one pays acute attention to the minutiae of the present––politically, personally, socially."
Minneapolis Star-Tribune - Ellen Akin
"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."
Washington Post - Robert Rubsam
"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."
Full Stop - Amber Ruth Paulen
"With Kairos, 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."
The Guardian - Natasha Walter
"One of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have ever read… Erpenbeck never reaches for the stock phrase or the known response…[her] rigorous and uncompromising imagination is invigorating all the way to the final page."
The Boston Globe - Cory Oldweiler
"Erpenbeck astutely conveys the affair's quotidian beats...[she] 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."
Commonweal Magazine - Bailey Trela
"Erpenbeck is wary of swift and unequivocal resolutions, choosing instead to reside in extended moments of tension. In effect, almost everything about Erpenbeck’s latest novel, from the musical texture of its prose to its occasionally synoptic narration, is arranged to allow these tensions to remain wonderfully unresolved...There is serendipity in the relationship’s beginning, and necessity in its ending."
NPR - Lily Meyer
"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."
The New Republic - Rumaan Alam
"Erpenbeck is adept at exploring big subjects via the intimate relationships between people... [Kairos is] a clear-eyed book, morally neutral and the more interesting for it."
Times Literary Supplement - Anna Katharina Schaffner
"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."
Los Angeles Times - Bethanne Patrick
"A novel that pushes deep into the evanescent gap between public and private lives."
Los Angeles Times - Charles Finch
"A writer with a roving, furious, brilliant mind…Erpenbeck has done it again."
The Atlantic - Gal Beckerman
"In Erpenbeck, Germany has a rare national writer whose portrayals of a ruptured country and century are a reminder that novelists can treat history in ways that neither historians nor politicians ever could, cutting through dogma, fracturing time, preserving rubble."
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
"Erpenbeck 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. It’s no surprise that she is already bruited as a future Nobelist....I don’t generally read the books I review twice, but this one I did."
The New Yorker - James Wood
"The most prominent and serious German novelist of her generation."
Nicole Krauss
"The brutality of her subjects, combined with the fierce intelligence and tenderness at work behind her restrained, unvarnished prose is overwhelming."
The New York Times - Claire Messud
"One of Germany’s finest contemporary writers."
Economist
"Ms. Erpenbeck has proved time and time again that she is a fearless, astute examiner of a country's soul."
NPR - John Powers
"Pain and pleasure do the tango in the engrossing new novel Kairos, the story of a love affair set in East Germany right before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's the latest book from the East Berlin born Jenny Erpenbeck who I fully expect to win the Nobel Prize sometime in the next five years. Erpenbeck—in Michael Hofmann's crystalline translation—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 – devaluing their money, dismantling their media, denying their values."
Rumaan Alam - The New Republic
"Erpenbeck is adept at exploring big subjects via the intimate relationships between people... [Kairos is] a clear-eyed book, morally neutral and the more interesting for it."
Library Journal
06/16/2023
Born in East Germany and now residing in Berlin, the multi-award-winning Erpenbeck (Go, West, Gone) turns in another major work rooted in the chaotic love affair between 19-year-old Katharina and Hans, a married writer 34 years her senior. She's sunflower-bright, he's brilliant and controlling, and though initially he insists that they meet only occasionally, they cannot keep away from each other. Related through two boxes' worth of diaries, letters, and tapes that Katharina mysteriously receives much later, their relationship cycles through ups and downs that are vividly rendered—at one point, Hans venomously recriminates Katharina for a single betrayal, though he has returned to the wife who banished him. (Katharina puts up with a lot, which gets exasperating.) What makes this affair so distinctive is its unfolding primarily in late 1980s East Berlin, finally drawing to a close with the end of the German Democratic Republic itself. Throughout, the contrast between Katharina's sense of recent German history and Hans's longer-view socialist-idealist lessons cuts deep, and U.S. readers might have wanted to hear more. In the end, it's unsettling to learn just how great Hans's own deceptions were. VERDICT Ice-pick precise and gorgeously written, if sometimes freighted too heavily with narrative, this expertly translated work offers insight into the personal and the political for astute readers.—Barbara Hoffert
Kirkus Reviews
2023-03-14
A thorny love affair and a momentous historical moment combine in this novel by prizewinning German playwright and author Erpenbeck, author of Go, Went, Gone (2017), etc.
Structured as a series of flashbacks, the novel begins with news of a funeral. Cut to East Berlin in the 1980s and a chance encounter on a public bus. Katharina, 19, meets Hans, a married writer 10 years older than her father. Erpenbeck evokes their early all-consuming passion, fueled by sex and a shared love of music and art, and deftly overlaps their points of view. “Why a love that has to be kept secret can make a person so much happier than one that can be talked about is something she wishes she could understand....Perhaps because a secret is not spent on the present, but keeps its full force for the future? Or is it something to do with the potential for destruction that one suddenly has?” As time passes, rifts and menaces appear. The lovers, from different generations, have experienced different Germanies. “Only a very thin layer of soil is spread over the bones, the ashes of the incinerated victims,” Katharina thinks. “There is no other walking, ever, for a German than over the skulls.” From her apartment in Berlin, she can see the Berlin Wall. Erpenbeck’s handling of characters caught within the mesh (and mess) of history is superb. Threats loom over their love and over their country. Hans is jealous, weak-willed, vindictive, Katharina self-abasing. At heart the book is about cruelty more than passion, about secrets, betrayal, and loss; it’s at its best as the Wall comes down. “Everything is collapsing,” Erpenbeck writes. “The landscape between the old that is being abolished and the new that is yet to be installed is a landscape of ruins.”
The personal and the political echo artfully in the last years of the German Democratic Republic.
