22 May 2024
COMMENT: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck wins the International Booker prize – a chaotic love at the end of times
Dr Edward Sugden, Senior Lecturer in American Studies
German writer Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann have won the International Booker prize for the novel Kairos.
In relentless, unflinching present tense sentences, punched on to the page, it explores the extent to which human hearts might rise above history. The book finds only fleeting and quickly crushed spaces for love to transcend all, however, as it plunges into the depths of interpersonal and social alienation and despair.
The book begins with a death. Katharina, in the present, learns of the long-expected (but no less shattering) demise of her one-time lover Hans. On receiving the news, she delves into an archive of records – letters, diaries, clippings – which memorialise their affair.
We then enter into the affair as it was lived. They fall in love in the last years of the German Democratic Republic (1945-1990). The socialist ideals of a better world that it was founded on had long since faded into a suffocating and doctrinaire bureaucratic conformism.
Image: Jenny Erpenbeck by Wikimedia Commons/Amrei-Marie.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article
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Senior Lecturer in American Studies
