Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos ****

Kairos is the story of a love affair between a young woman and an older man in East Berlin during the late 1980s. Their relationship is clearly a metaphor for the collapse of East Germany and Unification, but it's not a simple parallel and Erpenbeck doesn't twist the outcome for Katharina and Hans to make larger points. She captures the love that the characters feel toward their daily routines and the disorientation they feel when the society that supports those routines suddenly vanishes.

In the early chapters Erpenbeck has an engaging way of alternating between the viewpoints of the two lovers nearly sentence by sentence:

On that Friday in July, she thought: Even if he comes now, I'm still going. 

On that Friday in July, he spent all day over two sentences. Who knew writing was this hard, he thought.

She thought: I've had it up to here with him.

He thought: And it's not getting any better.

She grabbed her jacket and bag and went out.

He picked up his jacket and his cigarettes.

She crossed the bridge.

He walked up Friedrichstrasse.

She builds an evocative vision of East German life through specific locations and props such as the Ganymede restaurant, Café Arkade, Rotkäppchen sparkling wine, and Duet brand cigarettes. Hans delivers cultural commentary on the radio, so he provides lots of local color. Katharina takes a trip to visit her grandmother in Cologne, giving us readers a view of West German culture from the East German point of view.

The middle section of the book includes numerous references to people and events that went over my head. I could follow the story but not the deeper points that Erpenbeck was surely making. The vividness returns after the Wall comes down and the characters adjust to the disappearance of their culture.

Kairos won the International Booker Prize for 2024. I was surprised to learn that it's the first German novel to win the prize and the first with a male translator. 

Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm ****

Blockchain Chicken Farm is a collection of essays about the use of technology in rural China. Wang correctly notes that the stereotype of rural culture is it's backward and technologically ignorant. Her pieces present various initiatives that use technology to revitalize rural communities and integrate them into the globalized world. The title essay visits a chicken farm that tries to overcome supply-chain trust issues by tagging its organic product with a blockchain-protected ankle bracelet. Others describe using AI to monitor pig farms, drones to deliver pesticides in a targeted fashion, and an online shopping platform to provide villages with additional sources of income. Most of the projects are part of a government-sanctioned Rural Rejuvenation program.

Wang describes their visits to these projects in a casual tone that manages to feel authentic and to make its points without feeling didactic. The independent chapters did not attempt to work together toward a single argument, although Wang does repeatedly point out that techno-optimism assumes we can improve human flourishing through automation. 

Eliza Clark, Penance ** 1/2

Penance is a fictional true crime story, about a 2016 case in which three teenage girls tortured and burned a classmate. It purports to be the republication of a book that was pulled when the journalist was accused of misrepresenting the statements of the participants.

The theme of Penance –– and of the fictional book at its center –– is that our cultural obsession with true-crime stories derives from an unhealthy identification with criminals that leads to further violence. The perpetrators suffer from the usual pressures of being a teenage girl, and their exposure to true-crime fandom provides an unhealthy outlet for relieving the pressure, and they end up being consumed by it. It's not unlike the stories one hears about people getting radicalized through online communities.

One of the reviews excerpted on the back cover credits the author as "a genius with voice," but that was not my experience. Each girl gains a distinctive personality but they share an identical way of expressing themself. The fictional journalist author is presented as a hack and the prose supports that characterization. My biggest problem with Penance was that its style and organization felt nothing like an actually published book; rather, it seemed like a collection of materials that might be massaged into a book.

I expected Penance to investigate the ethics of the true-crime genre and of literary embellishment from the bare facts. These questions do come up in the author interview that make up the final 10 pages, but they are merely raised and not examined.

Clark –– the actual author –– convincingly creates a milieu in which the girls adapt their personae to their peers amid ever-shifting alliances. Her treatment of the class structure of Crow-on-Sea is less nuanced. We learn more details about the crime as we go along, but nothing that truly deepens our understanding.

Roy Jacobsen, The Unseen ****

My foray into Norwegian literature continues with The Unseen, the story of the Barrøy family living on their small island in Nordland. The book was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

The book starts with the local pastor paying a visit to Barrøy island, and the first chapter pulls off an elegant shift in point of view when "his eyelids close and his breathing becomes heavier" and the next sentence remarks on "a priest asleep in their home," making it clear that our protagonists are the family not the priest. Subsequent chapters describe the annual routines of farming and fishing. The outside world impinges on their lives in the form of flotsam from all over. They are not shut off from the world but do not approve of its ways.

The Unseen would have been a perfect book to read while cruising the Norwegian coast, passing islands very much like Barrøy. It paints a clear picture of the joys and difficulties of island life and tells its story with lovely imagery and Scandinavian reserve. But I bought my copy in Tromsø after our cruising was done, so I read it at home with nostalgia for our recently completed trip. I enjoyed it quite a bit, although it didn't seem to have anything to tell me beyond the story itself.

Jacobsen followed The Unseen with three sequels that follow Ingrid, the daughter who comes of age in The Unseen. I'm inclined to feel that The Unseen left us at an appropriate stopping point.

Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero **** 1/2

Our recent vacation in Norway was bookended by visits to two very fine polar exploration museums, the Fram Museum in Oslo and the Polar Museum in Tromsø. It was clear from both of them that Fridtjof Nansen was the most compelling character in the annals of Arctic explorers. He approached his expeditions with a scientific mindset and introduced many innovations in polar travel; he was charismatic but lacked leadership skills. Beyond his adventuring, he made significant contributions in neurology and oceanography, evangelized the sport of skiing, was a good artist, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping with the refugee crisis that followed the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

Huntford does a great job of capturing Nansen's depressive temperament and complicated relationships without resorting to imaginative psychologizing. He places Nansen's achievements in the context of the times. The heart of the book details the (first) Fram expedition, using material from the diaries of several participants to build a well-rounded portrait.

The idea behind the Fram expedition, by the way, was to purposely get frozen into the pack ice and drift to the North Pole with the natural current. It didn't happen, but they were able to prove that the Arctic Ocean was deep, without any land at the center, in contrast to Antarctica. Nansen eventually left the ship with one companion to attempt to reach the Pole by custom-designed sledge; the rest of the crew was happy to see him and his moods go. He reached the farthest north for the time, and coasted on his fame and success for the rest of his life. All subsequent expeditions consulted with Nansen for his insights into the design of sledges and skis, avoiding scurvy, or just to get his blessing for fundraising purposes.

While Huntford does a solid job of describing Nansen's routes and innovations, I would have liked more illustrations and better maps. The sections covering Nansen's post-expedition political career were less compelling. Perhaps that was inevitable, but I felt like Huntford's prose regressed to the mean of biography writing. Norwegian independence, the League of Nations, and the Russian Revolution are dealt with in a somewhat cursory manner, with the typical parade of names and dates.

Fascinating if a bit draining at times.