Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

Eastward Ho, and into Germany.

Jenny Erpenbeck comes from a fine East German lineage, including physicists, translators, authors, and various other members of the intelligentsia. She initially became an opera director, but as the soviet bloc crumbled around her, turned to writing.

Kairos is her fourth novel and won the International Booker Prize in 2024. She has also written plays, operas and essays.

Full disclosure: It's been a fair while since I read Kairos. I am very behind on my posts, as such the details are not as fresh in my mind as I would like, and the review will be considerably shorter.

Kairos follows a doomed love affair between a young woman and a much older man, in the latter days of East Germany. Of the novel, she says: "Thirty years have passed since the country in which I was born is gone, so I could dare to look back and take my time to carefully research what I lived through without really being aware of it."

I had very high hopes for this novel, I generally seem to agree with the International Booker committee. On this occasion though, I was left wondering if we had been reading the same book. Unlikable characters can sometimes work, and both the protagonists of the novel are certainly unlikable, selfish and arrogant. But worse, the philandering pair commit the gravest sin of all: to be unforgivably and irretrievably dull. Neither seems to possess anything approaching a personality; the affair entirely lacks  chemistry, and I entirely fail to see what either saw in the other.

The affair slowly progresses. Very slowly. The pair argue. The man becomes controlling. The woman tries to please him. And then, thankfully, the novel ends.

I think there were probably analogies to be drawn between the doomed relationship and the decline of East Germany. But as I don't really know much about the country's history, these were lost on me. The writing is by no means bad, but it is rather drear, and as the subject is terminally dull, the end effect is soporific.  

★★☆☆☆ (and I think that's rather generous).