‘Kairos’ by Jenny Erpenbeck (2021) – 294 pages Translated from the German by Michael Hoffman
Hans and Katharina – their eyes meet on a bus in East Berlin in 1986, and they fall in love.
“They were both on the 57 bus at exactly the right moment.”
Katharina is 19, and Hans, a somewhat famous writer, is 53 and married with a family. What could possibly go wrong? Her mother and her friends are skeptical, but Katharina is entirely swept off her feet. Hans’ wife Ingrid is busy with their son Ludwig, so Hans and Katharina have plenty of opportunities to be together and sleep together.
Despite nearly everyone’s doubts about this May-December relationship, for the first half of ‘Kairos’ the love affair between Hans and Katharina seems idyllic.
But reality intrudes eventually, and this idyll comes upon some very rough times. As ecstatic as the first half of the novel is, the misery of the second half exceeds the ecstasy.
There are times when Hans is busy nearly all the time with his wife and son, so Katharina spends more time at the theatre where she now works. There is a young man named Vadim who has shown some interest in her. They gradually get closer and they have sex one time.
Later Hans discovers a scrap of paper buried on her desk which she wrote describing the feeling she had when Vadim kissed her breasts for the first time. After he reads the note, Hans will never forgive her, calls her a whore. But Katharina hangs on desperately to what was once their love. She allows Hans to use her in sadomasochistic ways (“Yes, she wants him to hit her.”), but he will still not forgive her for that one night. Hans records his thoughts about her on a cassette several times.
“You deserve to go to hell for tossing our miracle in the shit.”
The backdrops for this less than idyllic romance are the final years of East Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the reunification with West Germany. There are many tidbits about German history, especially music and philosophy, that I found quite interesting but were ultimately overshadowed by the intense personal suffering.
As a reader, I felt that ‘Kairos’ could have been shortened to good effect. Both the ecstasy and the agony seemed to drag on for too many pages. Too many scenes between Hans and Katharina seemed repetitive.
Grade: B
Tony's Book World 
Posted by Rach on January 30, 2025 at 8:33 PM
Interesting review! This one was shortlisted for one of my book clubs but it drew quite dramatic reactions, from some who really wanted to read it and others that were dead set against. I am not sure why as this is quite a new book club and I am learning their characters :) In the end we chose Orbital, but as the winner of the Man Booker International prize I do have this on my TBR list.
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Posted by Anokatony on January 30, 2025 at 8:58 PM
Hi Rach,
I have read ‘Go, Went, Gone’ by Jenny Erpenbeck before and liked it a lot. Then I saw that ‘Kairos’ had won the International Booker, so I decided to read it. There were parts of ‘Kairos’ that I liked but overall I found it somewhat disappointing. First the idea of a 19 year old girl dating a 53 year old married man and hoping to find true love seemed preposterous. The novel is almost divided in half with the first half happy and the last half misery. And that last half of misery gets repetitive. I felt this might have made a good novella or short story, but it was dragged out extensively to 294 pages.
The parts about German music and history were the most interesting for me.
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Posted by Rach on January 31, 2025 at 4:08 PM
Thanks… hmm I didn’t realise about the 19 and 53 year old. That is a bit too close to my daughter and my partner which is a very off putting thought lol… and I can do without 300 pages of misery… I therefore appreciate you taking one for the team :D
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Posted by Anokatony on January 31, 2025 at 5:17 PM
Always willing to take one of the team.
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Posted by Janakay | YouMightAsWellRead on January 31, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Hi Tony! Read your review the other day but didn’t have time to leave a comment. I have a copy of this and HAVE strongly considered reading it, mainly because, like you, I read Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone, which I liked a very great deal. I’ve read enough reviews of Kairos, however, to give me pause — it’s not that I won’t EVER read it, just that it has a lot of competition from other works on my TBR, which interest me more at the moment. In fact, I’m more tempted by her earlier novels, Visitation & End of Days!
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Posted by Anokatony on January 31, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Hi Janakay,
My latest complaint is that I have read several 300-page novels recently which would have been better as 200-page novels, and ‘Kairos’ is one of them. It does happen that even a prizewinner will disappoint me.
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