An now, other opinions of Kairos

I do not generally read reviews of a book I intend to review until I've read the book. I would rather present my reaction as uncolored as possible by someone else's opinion. That obviously does not always happen if only because I read a book because I've read a review, although by the time i read the book I've usually forgotten what the review said.

When I do look at Amazon reviews, I look for those by readers who disliked a book I liked very much. If I've given a book five stars, why have others given it one? Why are our opinions of the same text so different?

All this is a preamble to say I've now read the negative comments about Kairos. I thought several were as interesting as the novel. For example, "I grew up in East Germany and was excited about this novel. But I am so disappointed! The love story… well… Hans is a despicable sadistic prick and Katharina too naive… and the interwoven philosophical ideas seem forced. I suffered through the book hoping for a turning point but there is none. It’s an exhausting read."

And: "I agree with the Amazon review titled 'Not Mastering the Past,' of this novel set in East Germany around the opening of the Berlin wall. A romance turned abusive becomes the vehicle for a revisionist perspective on German reunification. I disliked the book on many levels, although it is skillfully written. The character Hans is a familiar, repugnant type of intellectual. His 34 years younger lover Katharina discovers after his death that he was a Stasi informer, and muses in the next-to-last sentence of the novel that she was his 'mirror image.' The parallel, apparently, is that both were psychologically captive, brainwashed into giving up their privacy. This seems a bizarre exculpation of the uniquely pervasive culture of mutual spying that existed in East Germany. The Stasi’s penetration of all levels of society had less to do with communist ideology than with the seamless transition from Nazism to a Stalinist police state. Yet the reunification with the West is framed not as access to democracy but as a victory of capitalism and soulless consumerism over the humanitarian ideals of socialism.

"The tediously obsessive love affair begins with a sexual encounter (on Hans’ marital bed) to the accompaniment of Mozart’s Requiem, a lengthy scene which brought to my mind the German word Edelkitsch, 'noble kitsch.' (Translation note: the word “Slip” in German means panties, not “slip.”) For all its sophistication, this novel has a mushy core. The death throes of the relationship coincide with the fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification. 'What will history’s verdict be about our time?' the novel asks, stating that 'the question is still open.' In another place Katharina asks why it is that only they, the East Germans, have had to examine their conscience, and not the West Germans. Undoubtedly it was difficult and demeaning for many East Germans to find themselves on the losing side of history. But the fact is that West Germans have been grappling with their Nazi past in a way that East Germans never did. I grew up in West Germany and we studied that era in school nearly every year, with no hint of exculpation."

It's enough to make me want to reread Kairos with these comments in mind. 

An affair in East Germany before the Wall comes down

I should keep track of book recommendations so that I can thank the source after I've finished. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to whoever recommended Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos in the extraordinary translation by Michael Hofmann. 

I read no German, but I am confident that The New Republic is correct when it writes that Hofmann's translation "is invaluable—it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once 'loyal' and 'beautiful.'" Kairos won the 2024 International Booker Award and was long-listed for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. 

Erpenbeck was born and grew up in East Germany. In one sense, the Kairos story is simple: in the late 1980s, Katharina, a 19-year-old student who lives with her mother and brother in East Berlin, meets and falls passionately in love with and begins an affair with Hans, a 58-year-old married writer. Their affair has its ups and downs, the Berlin Wall comes down, the East German state is absorbed into West Germany, and Katharina and Hans split up.

To summarize Kairos so baldly is a travesty and a deception. Erpenbeck is able by shifting from Katharina's to Hans's point of view and back to evoke the ecstasy and passion of new love, which lasts about three weeks but continues anyway. She is able to show the texture of daily East German life of a typography/typesetting apprentice and a working writer/radio performer. It was not all bad and life was better than tolerant for many ordinary individuals.

Hans was born in 1930, so he was 15-years-old when the war ended. Katharina was born in 1969 and knows only life under Communist socialism. Erperbeck manages to convey convincingly the stresses that the age difference (Hans after all is older than her father) and life experiences provoke. She is somehow able to dramatize a lover's paranoia and jealousy while simultaneously managing to retain the reader's—this reader's—sympathy for the characters.

At the beginning of the novel, the reader knows something the characters do not that adds to the book's tension: the Berlin Wall is going to come down. When it does in November 1989 toward the end of the book, it is not so much a cataclysm for Katharina and Hans as a thousand small changes, negative and positive, that demonstrate life will be different from now on. It seems clear that Katharina in her early 20s will adjust; Hans, not so well.

I closed Kairos awed by Erpenbeck's and Hofmann's skill at creating, at evoking Katharina and Hans, their feelings and situations, the time and the place. An extraordinary novel. 

An 1810 quest for the animals that left giant bones

I picked up a copy of Carys Davies's novel West because a British writer whose opinion I respect said it is one of the best books he'd read, a book he returns to from time to time to reread.  I'd never heard of Carys Davies, but with praise like that West sounded like something I should look at.

West (2018) is the author's first novel which she published after two short story collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She is also the recipient of a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a 2025/26 Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. She has now published twi additional novels, The Mission House (2020) and Clear (2024),

Born in Wales, Davies grew up there and in England's Midlands, lived and worked worked as a freelance journalist for twelve years in New York and Chicago, and now lives in Edinburgh.

West is a slim book. You can read it in a couple hours even if you are a slow reader. I'd be tempted to call it an extended short story except that it is exceptionally rich and complex. It takes place shortly after Lewis and Clark return from their trek, so around 1810. The central character is Cy Bellman, a widowed Pennsylvania mule breeder, who reads about and is enraptured by a news story that bones of an unknown giant creature have been discovered in Kentucky. Leaving his pre-teen daughter Bess in the care of his sister, Bellman sets off on a Quixotic quest to discover the living animals that the bones had once supported.

The bulk of the novel is an account of Bellman's adventures and the lives of Bess and her aunt in Pennsylvania. The short chapters sketch the significant incidents that take place in these during the two years the book covers. It is remarkable how much meaning Davies can pack into a few pages without sounding rushed or insufficient. The point of view shifts from character to character. Indeed, I was impressed that Davies would introduce a character in the middle of the book only to write her out three pages later. But why not? She's served her purpose, enriched the narrative, and is no longer relevant.

I agree with the writer. West is a remarkable book and worth rereading from time to time.