Kairos - Outside of a Dog

336 pages

English language

Published June 24, 2023 by Norton & Company Limited, W. W., New Directions.

ISBN:: 9780811229340

No rating (1 review)

Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation ) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos―an unforgettably compelling masterpiece―tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a …

Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation ) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos―an unforgettably compelling masterpiece―tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: “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.” In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on his work as a translator: “Hofmann’s translation is invaluable―it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once ‘loyal’ and ‘beautiful.’”

4 editions

Jim Brown reviewed Kairos by Michael Hofmann

"two different sorts of time, two competing presents, two everyday realities, one serving as the other's netherworld"

No rating

This is a love story with power dynamics that will make you angry - an older, married man with a much younger women, the former often manipulating the latter. But all of this happens in the context of 1980s Berlin, just before (and then during) the fall of the Wall. The writing is great, which makes me wonder how much we should thank the translator (Michael Hofmann).

There are moments in this book that remind me of China Miéville's The City and the City. Here's one:

"Through a tunnel and then up to the platform, and now she's suddenly on the other side of the steel barrier. She knows what it looks like when seen from the East. You're almost forced to look at it when you stand on the eastbound platform, waiting for the train heading towards Strausberg or Erkner or Ahrensfelde. But now all of the sudden what …

This is a love story with power dynamics that will make you angry - an older, married man with a much younger women, the former often manipulating the latter. But all of this happens in the context of 1980s Berlin, just before (and then during) the fall of the Wall. The writing is great, which makes me wonder how much we should thank the translator (Michael Hofmann).

There are moments in this book that remind me of China Miéville's The City and the City. Here's one:

"Through a tunnel and then up to the platform, and now she's suddenly on the other side of the steel barrier. She knows what it looks like when seen from the East. You're almost forced to look at it when you stand on the eastbound platform, waiting for the train heading towards Strausberg or Erkner or Ahrensfelde. But now all of the sudden what was inside is outside, and what was ordinary is now cut off from her and no longer visible. Suddenly everything is inverted, topsy-turvy, now she's behind the picture, behind what was once the surface of some unreachable beyond. The white line, a foot and a half from the edge of the platform, is not to be breached before the train has come to a complete stop, says the voice on the PA. Katharina and all those others waiting follow the rule, they don't cross the line, they even prefer to stand in the middle of the platform, On the short side of the station the glass facade cuts off the top of the building from the air outside, which in principle is still Eastern air, but because it gives access to the West is sort of Western air too, and outside the glass facade is an iron platform, where soldiers patrol back and forth with rifles on their backs, their silhouettes clearly visible. Behind the steel barrier that runs parallel to the train track, and that on this side too is a steel barrier, the S-Bahn prusumably continues to run, in the familiar way, towards Strausberg or Erkner or Ahresfelde. Or not? Does the East, which so far has been her element, cease to exist the moment she can no longer see it? Has she, Katharina, displaced it from present to past with those few strides to the other side of Friedrichstrasse station? Or is this gray station endowed with the power to hold two different sorts of time, two competing presents, two everyday realities, one serving as the other's netherworld? But then where is she, when she stands on the borderline? Is it called no-man's-land because someone wandering around in it no longer has any idea who he is?" (67-68)