Recommend: No<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not all Booker Prize winners are created equally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kairos <\/em>is a punishing journey obscured from view intially by a promising opening. A woman sits in her room with the radio on. She is dialled into a Zoom meeting on her laptop, muted and silent. She later learns that if she\u2019d had the volume on she would have heard Chopin. It was Chopin playing at the funeral.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Will you come to my funeral? The woman is Katharina and the man, now deceased, was Hans. Kairos<\/em> is entirely their story. No other character in this book matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the Zoomed funeral, our time with this version of Katharina is very limited – just enough time to witness her take delivery of a box of files left to her by Hans. These are pieces of paper we don\u2019t see but they provide the impetus to pry into the past: the days when Katharina was ending her teenage years and Hans was thirty years her senior and they were lovers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so the prologue ends and here we really begin, in the bulk of the story, in 1986 East Berlin and Hans and Katharina meet, rapidly infatuated with one another, and begin an affair that drags on for years and pages that feel like years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erpenbeck shows us the relationship between the two in all its stages. But this is not just a novel about a love affair. So much of Erpenbeck\u2019s focus is on East Germany in the late 1980s just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Erpenbeck writes as though her audience is so deeply familiar with the time that huge chunks of the plot are in conversation with its history. For the first time Hans and Katharina make love, their actions are propelled to dizzying heights by weaving in and out of the choral vinyl that Hans has selected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While she takes off his glasses and lays them aside, and he for the first time enfolds her in his arms, humankind begs for peace and everlasting light. She takes his face in both hands and kisses him very gently. Then a lone young voice sounds and praises God, because if she praises Him, He will perhaps spare her. The way her bare shoulder feels in his cupping hand during the prayer, the one curve under the other, is something he won\u2019t forget as long as he lives. To thee comes all flesh,<\/em> yes, that\u2019s how it is, he thinks, and then he stops thinking.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The sounds are so of their time and yet unfamiliar to my modern, agnostic, Western ears. The hotpot of intimate imagery, accompanied by such present religious music, makes it difficult to really get a hold of the feelings of Hans and Katharina. They have become elevated to an icon status before we are able to know them. It makes them feel alien at the birth of their passion and therefore when that passion eventually wastes away and spoils it is difficult to feel their sorrow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At all times, I felt very removed from this romance. It began in an unrelatable fashion – the two meet getting off a bus – and never does it recover into something recognisable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So what goes wrong with their affair? You know something happens. The prologue has Katharina informed of Hans\u2019 death by a long distance phone call. Katharina watches Hans\u2019 funeral on Zoom in a hotel room. These are not lovers that have prospered with the passing of time, we know that from the very first page. But this is a flaw in Erpenback\u2019s construction. The only source of tension is that we don\u2019t know why Hans\u2019 doesn\u2019t end his days with his younger lover. But I am so uninvested in this relationship. I don\u2019t like Katharina – she\u2019s cold and stuck up and so young that you know she is doomed from the beginning. I don\u2019t like Hans – he is pretentious and is a strong contender for the most unfunny man in the history of Germany. I don\u2019t like the two together – they whine and they preach and they speak endlessly of a socialist politics that is destined to become irrelevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At this point I realised I needed to leave this book as Unfinished Business. But it\u2019s a Booker Prize\u2026 So I mustered up all my determination and squandered many weekends battling through to make it to the end. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Structurally, Erpenbeck makes some good decisions. The interplay of Hans and Katharina\u2019s perspectives means it can be difficult to tell one\u2019s thoughts from the other. It\u2019s a nice trick. The writing is deliberately giving the impression that these two lovers are entirely twinned; one cannot be unravelled from the other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At the outset, Katharina was counting the days till their reunion, then the hours, now, on the train, she\u2019s calculated how many minutes still. The quick repetition of phrasing between the characters also stands to increase the tension when it becomes clear that this novel is all about their lack of a life together. When recounting a common event in the early days, the easy flowing of the writing from Katharina\u2019s voice into Hans\u2019 shows us that the story we are witnessing will be remembered differently by each party later on. There are conflicting interpretations at play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This tension, though, is ultimately unrealised. Hans is a married man embarking on an affair with a teenager. But his wife and himself have already agreed to an open relationship. It is revealed early that Katharina is by no means the first lover he has taken, although she is the youngest. Katharina is so vaguely and unreliably drawn that she is a hostile figure to the reader. She is a teenager that refers to a fifty year old man as \u201cmy darling\u201d. Most of the book is framed from her perspective (remember, the prologue casts her as the last living party) but her coming of age is really just the fulfilment of Hans\u2019 desire. From the moment she meets Hans to the very last page, Katharina devotes her entire life to Hans. If you had a friend who suddenly started talking to you like this, you\u2019d quickly start making excuses for why you can\u2019t catch up for coffee this week. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Every single day, Katharina realises that she and Hans have long since ceased to be two separate beings, they are completely and utterly one. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The pacing is too slow and the stakes are too low.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Putting aside my issues with character development, my biggest struggle was with the writing. Overlong political diatribes padded out chapters. Religious imagery embroidered passages despite neither of the characters being particularly religious, which made me think Erpenbeck was striving for some sublime height that only she could see. One paragraph often filled a whole page, stuffed full of commas, making me uncertain of my footing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What will he do if she doesn\u2019t return to him? Find another woman to bed, as soon as possible, to displace this memory that, during her absence, has moved unerringly into the centre of his preoccupations?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Plot points are vulnerable to copycat chapters. One of the two seem to always be on holidays – a narrative device to emphasise the distance between them. One of the two is often recounting previous loves – a narrative device to show the ever changing allure of the \u2018new\u2019. One of the two will intermittently try half-heartedly at a creative career – a narrative device to show that they are each reliant on their current East Berlin society to derive meaning from their endeavours. In isolation, these are valid devices for Erpenbeck to employ. However, all are repeated so frequently that it feels as though there are only three chapters to this book, and we\u2019re being made to re-read them over and over again with only minor variations to the original. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kairos <\/em>is a claustrophobic, overwrought novel. You are stuck in East Berlin in the late 1980s, just as much as Hans and Katharina are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s no mention of it in her diary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1288,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1280"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1636,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions\/1636"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
She looks down at her coffee cup in front of her and says nothing.
Will you come to my funeral, he says again.
Why funeral – you\u2019re alive, she says.
He asks her a third time: Will you come to my funeral?
Sure, she says, I’ll come to your funeral.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n
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At first, Hans counted the days, then the hours, and now – she must be in the train bound for home – he\u2019s counting the minutes. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n
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