Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos plots the course of a relationship as the end of East Germany looms. Hans is the kind of male character from a Milan Kundera novel: a married man who intellectualises why he can’t keep his cock in his pocket, whose wife cuts to the kiss-chase by referring to his mistresses as “whores”. His latest girlfriend, Katherina, is thirty-fours younger but proves to be a match in more ways than he expects. At first the affair makes special the streets, restaurants and bars of East Berlin where they meet, everywhere given significance and meaning, but as their love wanes and becomes poisonous and overwhelming, “It would be too painful if they went along there again and remembered at every turn what a breathtaking utopia then began, which is now spoiled, ruined.” Hans desperately resorts to S&M, domestic abuse and tortuous psychological pressure to wrestle back control and get the relationship back to what he wants. Katherina, heartbroken and damaged by a man indoctrinated to defend his hypocritical status quo at all costs, whose friendship group hates Hans, fights to keep her life on track as best she can, “She sees herself for the first time taking off the rings Hans has given her, and how it makes her feel so light, so scarily light that she threatens to float up and away into the air”. Jenny Erpenbeck’s great skill is that she shows but never tells. There are no crass authorial interventions as the ugly, fag end of the relationship is as bleak and depressing as the end of East Germany itself, no more jobs for life, no more welfare for life, no more Big Brother. When Katharina visits West Germany she’s profoundly shocked and shaken by seeing a group of homeless people begging, “Theoretically, Katharina knows they have beggars like this in the West, but it’s nothing like seeing them with your own eyes. The truth is always concrete, wasn’t that something Lenin said?” Welcome to western style freedom. A worthy winner of this year’s International Booker Prize and wonderfully translated by Michael Hofmann, Kairos is a brand new classic and Jenny Erpenbeck’s back catalogue an immediate must read. Totally recommended.

Kairos

– Jenny Erpenbeck – published by Granta - £9.99

Steven Long