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The Conversation
The Conversation
Isabelle Hesse, Senior lecturer, English, University of Sydney

Utopia gone wrong: identity and history intersect in Jenny Erpenbeck’s haunting new novel

Thomas Val/Unsplash

Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann, is a story about a relationship between a young woman and an older married man, set against the backdrop of the final years of the German Democratic Republic.

But Kairos is much more than a story about an affair. It is about chance encounters and finding one’s place in a world on the cusp of disintegration.

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