Has anyone read ‘Kairos’?

The novel by Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos, has won the International Booker Prize, which is awarded annually ‘for the finest single work of fiction from around the world which has been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.’As such she shares the prize with Michael Hoffman, her translator, who has done a brilliant job. She is the first German novelist and he the first male translator to win the award.

The novel is a romance of sorts, between a 19-year-old student and a 50-something , married, semi-famous professor and novelist. Set mostly in East Berlin in the late 1980s, the affair tracks the history of the country before and during the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

When I started reading the book, I was dazzled by the immediacy, vividness and general brilliance of the writing. I would have given the book a five star plus. The quality of the prose, set in the present tense, continues to the end, and one can taste life in East Berlin at that time in fascinating detail. This background, which is intimately interwoven with the characters’ lives, is a major part of the book’s attraction. Erpenbeck has said that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the turbulence that followed was what led her to become a writer, because she lost the system that she knew and had grown up in.

However, as I went on reading I became less enthused because I found both the main characters singularly unappealing. She, Katharina, is a prize idiot, obsessed by a man who abuses her, physically and mentally, to the point of surrendering all independence and even free thought. And he, Hans, is simply awful: full of his own importance, an unfaithful husband, terrible father, a manipulative and abusive lover. I was also annoyed that Katharina’s family, with whom she is close, never lift a finger to dissuade her from this destructive relationship.

I will not describe the book in more detail because multiple reviews can be found online, by people more qualified than me. It makes for uneasy reading at times—one critic describes it as a ‘wallow’. Others enthuse.

Nevertheless, I think Erpenbeck deserved her win, although I have not read all the other books on the shortlist. In this age when everything has to be politically correct to the point of blandness, and anyone expressing an unpopular opinion is trolled into oblivion, it is refreshing to read somebody who is not out to please—especially since the quality of her writing is outstanding. It is a novel that will provoke discussion and debate. Also, I loved watching the video of her acceptance speech.

It is an unsettling book, so I was interested in people’s reaction to it.

Thoughts?