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.'"
