Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck: book review
Overview: Katharina is 19 in East Berlin in the late 1980s when she catches the eye of a man on the bus and proceeds to fall into a complicated affair. It turns out this man is Hans, a married man ten years older than Katharina's own father. They begin to see each other in secret, when Hans's wife and son were away, and the affair expands to cover years of Katharina's life. At the onset of the book, Katharina, now a full-grown adult, is looking back on this affair by digging through the artifacts she has of her and Hans. This acclaimed novel, translated from German, won the International Booker Prize in 2024. Overall: 4
Thoughts:
You might notice I'm writing this review a little differently because I truly don't know how to review Kairos, and the conventional number rating system isn't working in my brain in regards to this book. I am glad I read the book. I can't really say I enjoyed it, but I'm glad I read it. I feel like I learned a lot by reading it, especially since the American education system (in my experience) covered nothing about this period of time in general and rarely covered European history at all. I found this book most fascinating as a very intimate look at a pivotal point in history. I loved the insight about what it was like to live in Berlin on the cusp of the fall of the Berlin Wall and right afterwards. The historical bits sprinkled through the book, which become much more present in the latter half of the book, were by far my favorite part. They were the sections I read with the most attention.
Where I struggled with this book was the density mixed with the lack of plot mixed with not particularly liking any of the characters. I'm used to books with long paragraphs. I'm used to no quotation marks in novels. I didn't think this would be an issue for me. But while the prose can be beautiful at times, it can also be extremely tedious when paired with these other formatting elements. Pairing this with no propulsion in the plot, and I struggled to get through this. The central affair is unspooled so slowly that the tension is all but removed. Also, it's hard to become invested in the characters, another thing that usually motivates my reading. I like Katharina enough, but her personality is so flattened by the abusive relationship with Hans that it's hard to deeply connect with her. She seems to just float through life, and her intense devotion to Hans is difficult to understand beyond the obvious implications of what happens in an abusive relationship. But even that idea of the initial spark that drew her in was hard to fathom. I am not a big plot person by any means, but there truly was not enough plot here for me. I felt like I was wading through a swamp at times trying to get to the end. It felt like reading a classic for school in the sense that I felt like it was good I read it, but I wouldn't call the experience fun.
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