- Love is central in this 2024 winner of the International Booker Prize for fiction. And the power of infidelity. Jenny Erpenbeck is a celebrated German author whose previous novels have won or been shortlisted for multiple awards.
- In Kairos (the ancient god of fortunate moments) young nineteen year old Katharina meets fifty-three year old Hans on a bus in East Berlin and they become lovers. The time period is the late 1980's just before the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the re-integration of East and West Germany. Hans adores her beauty and intelligence, but he is married. They have to keep it secret. He’s a writer and broadcaster, she a trainee printer and typesetter. They love music and they like cafes and restaurants and films. Their relationship is intense but it's also on-again off-again over the next few years.
- In the background is the social upheaval surrounding them. Hans in particular does not relish the West. He's always appreciated the Russian state and its communist legacy. ‘…the Russians out of a backwards country created an industrial state in the space of two decades: Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’.
- At one point Katharina visits Cologne in the West to see her aunt, her family, and her grandmother for her birthday. She sees beggars on the streets. Manfred, her uncle, trots out the usual ‘lazy, is what they are’ rhetoric. But clothing, food and utilities are a lot cheaper. She even visits a sex shop, something non-existent in the East. Erpenbeck describes what the shop has on offer in one of most extraordinary paragraphs in a literary novel you're ever likely to read. Here it is in full:
She sees all at once all there is for a human to see. She sees penises, stiff cocks with bulgy veins, rosy, pallid, brown, and black, with glistening heads, sees them thrust fat and stiff into slits, into mouths, shoved between breasts, gripped in hands, see female vulvas, their wavy flesh, sees them open, hairy or clean shaven, wet, sullied, dripping, gleaming, stretching, sees pendulous breasts, tits with great dark areoles, and others, pointy pink raspberries, sees gaping mouths, gaping assholes, plump labia, wrinkled ball sacks, everything pushed together, rubbed together, forced apart, thrusting, gagging, sucking, drooling, strings of saliva, here, on the ground of freedom, tits and cocks and cunts, she sees asses and erections, sees massive hard-ons, slutty tongues, sees liquids burst from knobs, ejaculated over buttocks and breasts, into mouths, onto eyelids and tongues, sees slime, spunk, spit, and piss, sees shit...
- Her frequent sex with Hans is usually loving and sensitive but often descends into pain and abuse. He ties her to her bed and strikes her with his belt. ‘A long time ago it was a game. Now it’s deadly earnest.’
- His wife, Ingrid, discovers the affair and throws Hans out. But is the marriage really over? He writes: ‘the relationship exists on a plane that (however painful) leaves the foundations of the marriage untouched’. As usual he gets it both ways. He and Ingrid get back together and Katharina gets a job at a Frankfurt theatre, where she has an affair with Vadim.
- Hans won't forgive her for that. He owns her after all. He belittles her, insults her, blames her entirely. They soon drift apart. He loses his job as do so many in the old East Germany.
- Erpenbeck has written a deep and penetrating (sorry) exploration into relationships, passions, and personal pain. Embedded in political and social structures that govern so much that we may be unaware of.
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