Reviews - Kairos | The StoryGraph

1.94k reviews for:

Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck

3.47 AVERAGE

lindsey_bear's review against another edition

3.0

challenging dark emotional tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I found this book very tough to get through. While I thought the setting of the book was extremely interesting and added to the experience, I found the relationship outlined in the book absolutely insufferable. Hans’ emotional abuse of Katharina was frustrating, and her tolerance of it through years and years even more so. I also found the style of switching perspectives between the two, even sometimes mid sentence was hard to follow. Maybe if I was more literarily capable/knowledgable this would have been more of a moving novel, but as a reader for pure pleasure I found Kairos more of a laborious piece.

njos3ph's review against another edition

4.5

challenging emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

oktarynowa's review against another edition

2.0

When I first opened this book and saw the way the dialogues were formatted - with no quotation marks and built into the paragraphs - I already knew this would be a hard read. While this stylistic choice worked well in some scenes overall it just made a novel hard to read and I often had to reread parts of it to fully grasp what is going on. The oversaturation with references didn't help either. However, my main issue with the book is that the background of the story, the life in DDR and the fall of the Berlin Wall, was way way more interesting than the actual storyline. Reading about Hans' and Katharina's unhealthy relationship was not only tiring but also simply infuriating.

ajevi's review against another edition

3.5

challenging dark emotional informative tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

_georgie_bateman_'s review against another edition

3.5

I loved the first two thirds of this novel, but I thought the last third let it down a bit. The beginning and middle were so fast paced, a chaotic love story and it was so well layered with deception but also lust, loss and cruelty. It was gorgeously written and some of the descriptions were just breathtaking. Towards the end I thought the writing got a bit confused and I found myself just wanting to finish it. There were also lots of references to philosophers and composers, lots of references to European and German history that were quite niche- I almost found myself skipping over those bits.

rose_meilan's review against another edition

DID NOT FINISH: 73%

did not enjoy reading it so much that even though I thought it was an interesting piece of literature I could not bring myself to finish it

marcnash21stc's review against another edition

2.0

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UzA7ooWYsg

telaurars's review against another edition

2.0

DNF • strange plot that isn’t backed up by any sort of character development; the fact that there’s no quotation marks for dialogue isn’t a fun creative choice, it makes the book infinitely harder to read and enjoy when it’s already a weird ass plot