On the surface, Kairos is the simple story of an affair in late 80s Berlin between 19-year-old Katharina and Hans, a married writer 34 years her senior. The imbalance of power, death of idealism and creeping paranoia that characterise their relationship is a study of geopolitics in miniature. What begins as fate – the pair get on the same bus and build a mythology around this chance encounter and other apparent “signs” – becomes an agreement of sorts. “We mustn’t make each other miserable,” Hans, a serial adulterer, says on their first night together. But ultimately, they will.
Stylishly translated by Michael Hofmann, this is a finely calibrated book, the fourth by the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, who was born in East Berlin in 1967. Her clever treatment of the relationship as an allegory never hinders the depiction of Hans and Katharina’s day-to-day reality, or their slide from bliss to misery. The subterfuge involved in their early meetings adds to the allure for both participants, who are absorbing, flawed and, in Hans’s case at least, nauseating. Katharina is “an ‘illegal’”, we are told, who can’t talk about Hans or appear with him in public. At one point she is not allowed to answer the phone in his apartment and experiences a sort of erasure, “pretending not to exist”.
Erpenbeck’s subtle use of mirroring reflects the unbreakable links that remained between East and West Germany, even when divided by the Wall, and the idea of Hans and Katharina as doubles, almost twins (“they lie so close that when one turns, the other turns too”). The increasingly controlling Hans, Katharina thinks, only wants “a more attractive mirror for himself in her young flesh”. Later, after she sleeps with a colleague her own age, Hans subjects her to endless recriminations, claiming that her betrayal “made two of me. One who believes, and one who doubts.”
Observation, too, is a recurring theme, whether with regard to pleasure or control. In a late plot twist it is revealed that even the watchers are being watched in the last days of the GDR, while Katharina notes that “in museums… only those things are put on show that can find no safe place in reality”. Hans, meanwhile, a product of his times, colours the thinking of his much younger lover, and their shared existence turns illusory.
As the dreams of a socialist utopia crumble (“Coca-Cola… succeeded where Marxist philosophy has failed”), the pair find themselves in a new world, Katharina feeling like “a bad copy” of West Berliners, while Hans’s livelihood disappears. She is young enough to rebuild her life, but one of her pronouncements (“Only after a comprehensive destruction is it possible to think about a resurrection”), spoken at the start of the novel, proves true.
• Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann) is published by Granta (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
