At the start of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, a woman is asked by a man whether she will attend his funeral. She consents, but when he passes away months later, she does not make it to the event. She knows, though, exactly which songs will be played—which Mozart concerto, Goldberg Variation, and Chopin piece. Ads interrupt as she listens to each piece over YouTube, a single candle lit. Orderly and practical, the scene is intimate yet removed, tragic yet destabilizing. Absent navigable emotional descriptors or cues, Erpenbeck’s neutral, steadily forward-marching prose renders the relationship all the more confounding even as it lends the novel’s events––historic and personal––an aura of the fated and immutable. 

Translated by Michael Hofmann, Kairos is Erpenbeck’s sixth book and her fourth novel. It opens in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, and carries readers through the dissolution of a socialist state. The relationship between Katharina, a nineteen-year-old student, and Hans, who is fifty-four, married and a father, begins in East Germany under the German Democratic Republic, before weathering—and reflecting—the political and social turmoil of reunification from two distinct generational perspectives. Katharina is curious but not among first to embrace the culture and ideals of the West. Hans, in contrast, resists change completely, having spent three decades longer within the socialist experiment of the East.  

Kairos is the Greek god of fortunate moments, and the affair between the two does begin fortuitously, with evening coffee dates and dinners, long walks, and forays into philosophy, politics, and classical music. But as the honeymoon phase ends, it becomes difficult to think of any moment along the relationship’s timeline as lucky. Erpenbeck paints an insular and intense portrait of codependency. The prose tumbles forward in a fugue of mostly unpunctuated he said, she said: “Do you feel hungry? Sure. Then let’s go eat. Sure. It feels good to be walking beside him, she thinks. It feels good to be walking beside her, he thinks.” What at first might seem charming and sweet quickly becomes claustrophobic. The boundaries between the two lovers crumble figuratively and syntactically. 

Dissuaded by Hans from her original plan to study commercial art in a distant city, Katharina leaves to study theater and set design in Berlin. There, Katharina’s one-time breach of Hans’ tenuous trust incites a spiral of manipulation, punishment, and abuse that spans years. These chapters are repetitive, draining; they seem never-ending. Hans employs every possible tactic to prevent Katharina from escaping his orbit, and he shapes Katharina’s perspectives of herself, their relationship, and the world.

Erpenbeck hints at coming-of-age themes throughout Kairos, but Katharina’s journey feels uncomfortable, complex, and uncertain. Along the edges of her nearly all-consuming relationship with Hans, Katharina becomes passionate about her work, grows apart from then closer to old friends and acquaintances, takes a female friend as a lover. Is it too simple to draw the parallel between the small steps she takes away from Hans and the decisions that lead her away from her childhood and adolescent values under the German Democratic Republic? 

As her attachment to Hans fades, Katharina awakens to the potential of a new future. Her burgeoning independence is nearly undetectable––until it isn’t. For Erpenbeck’s protagonist, agency, conviction, and confidence manifest unexpectedly, in a surprise whirlwind that mirrors the fall of the Wall and dissolution of the regime. In the confusing period that followed the newly opened border between East and West, the change seemed inexplicable—impossible, even. Then, in a matter of days, historians and pundits rushed to reconfigure the narrative: Any number of influences and events of the time meant inevitably that the GDR––and the Cold War––would come to an end just how they did.

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. Katharina wonders who she will be with each transition, however small or large: “Is she always the same person, whatever she’s doing––or is she multitudes, like the figures on a carousel, who always go by one at a time?…The future trails its loose ends into the present until it becomes the present, settles on one or other human flesh, and its flourishing or brazen regime abruptly begins.”

+++

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. She is the author of The Old Child & Other Stories, The End of Days, The Book of Words, and Visitation, which NPR called “a story of the century as seen by the objects we’ve known and lost along the way.” The End of Days won the Hans Fallada Prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize. Erpenbeck lives in Berlin.

+

Michael Hofmann is poet and translator.

+

Regan Mies lives in New York, where she is an editorial assistant and recent graduate of Columbia University. Her translations, short fiction, and book reviews have appeared in No Man’s Land, the Asymptote blog, Necessary Fiction, the Cleveland Review of Books, On the Seawall, and elsewhere.