Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

German author Jenny Erpenbeck’s books are slathered with praise and for good reason. She has an impressive body of work and her most recent book won the Booker Prize for fiction. The title, Kairos, means different things but essentially ‘timely’ or ‘at the right time’ or maybe I’ll use my favorite term where Kairos = Propitious. This is a love story tied to the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of Soviet influence and East German rule. Or, maybe it was just Soviet rule given the Government in East Germany was largely a puppet…

The love story is between a (much) older man (a writer, and why not) and a 19 year old girl who falls for him. While they are committed to each other, things begin to fall apart and that falling goes on for maybe more of the book than I need. The older man (the writer,) an obvious narcissist, suffers at her betrayal of him that she committed in a one night stand with another man. He does what he can to punish her for the transgression, sending her written notes and recorded tapes that I found to be essentially cruel, and she lets it happen, maybe far longer than most women would put up with.

But they are also influenced by the fall of East Germany and the acquisition by the West German state. Much of what the older man has lived and thought of as meaningful is now moot. The young woman begins to learn that her life will be different than his as the new order evolves.

One would need to know more about the actual experience of people who lived through the fall of East Germany to fully appreciate what Erpenbeck does since the insertion of political events at times feels contrived to one as ignorant as me, but she has obviously hit the mark with the universe of readers. There is a source that claims Erpenbeck, raised in East Germany, once had such a relationship, but I will not say it’s fact and leave that to speculation only.

I enjoyed the book and found it outstanding with maybe feeling a bit sorry for the naive young woman who, by the end, has taken more than she should from an aging, self-centered, and soon-to-be irrelevant lover, living in a world that is being redefined completely.