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.