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”.
