I this book because...
I love the East Berlin setting of this book, just before and after the Wall comes done. It’s perfect for an intense, melancholy love story between a young woman in her late teens and a married writer who is older than the young woman’s parents.
As I read the book, I couldn’t help comparing their rocky relationship to the state of East and West Germany and how things were so contentious back then, even after reunification. I was also a college student in the late 1980s and related to the idealism of the young woman during the end of the Cold War. I didn’t travel to Berlin back then, but did go to the Soviet Union, Budapest, and Prague. That era is gone, but lives on in this book.
1 author picked Kairos as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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…