Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is one of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have ever read. On one level, it is a love story, or rather a story about the loss of love. It begins with a woman, Katharina, hearing about the death of her former lover. Boxes of his papers are delivered to her apartment, and when she finally sits down to open them the past rises before her like a pack of playing cards thrown into the air.
The book then moves back to their first meeting, tracing step by step the contours of a relationship that is not only intellectually and emotionally complicated in itself, but whose difficulties are compounded through its relationship to the collapse of East Germany. Katharina and Hans meet in East Berlin in 1986, and they live out the disintegration of all their hopes and dreams, personally and politically, throughout the course of the novel.
