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.
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