Reviews - Kairos | The StoryGraph

1.96k reviews for:

Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck

3.47 AVERAGE

gozlemes's review against another edition

3.75

challenging dark sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

kariss182's review against another edition

2.0

Ugh god this book was hard work.

The romance element just seemed insane and out of no where and that's what the whole book revolves around, I have no idea what they liked in each other. Things just happened with no build up throughout, so much so i constantly forgot a lot of things as there would just be one line about them.

The people are pretencious and that's normally an issue for me, same with unlikable characters, but in this there was nothing else to make me invested.

conorrjohnston's review against another edition

3.0

challenging slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Kairos is a book that I would have to re-read to love. Beneath Erpenbeck's flowery prose of a toxic, doomed-to-fail relationship is a hidden analogy to East and West Germany. Having not been too familiar with the GDR's history, and its subsequent dissolution, I found the analogy hard to follow. Worse, Erpenbeck forces the reader to already be familiar with the history, as she does not try to bridge the gap for you. The betrayal of Hans, and the link between his conservatism and Katherina's political liberalism, only became evident towards the end.

Thus, I have to take this novel at its most macro level, ignoring the parallels of Hans and Katherina's relationship. Their relationship is of course doomed to fail from the beginning. It is obsessive, borderline narcissistic (if there is a way a couple can be narcissistic), and toxic. Even at the couple's best, there were obvious cracks due to the unsustainability of their affair. Hans is a serial cheater, and Katherina is one of many mistresses that he has taken over the years. And she knows this too, and it plagues her thoughts from the beginning. She finds herself wondering about the previous women he's been with, and if she too will become just like them. As the reader, I was hoping that she would become one of those women and that Hans would leave her in the past. Unfortunately not. We go through about halfway through the novel until Katherina commits the ultimate transgression- sleeping with another man. It is hard to miss the irony, and I almost wonder if this has something to do with West Germany and the GDR, but I couldn't make the connection. Of course, Hans, the serial cheater, drives Katherina to the point of suicide as a result of her cheating. It is the ultimate betrayal to him, and he purportedly can never love her again. There is about 100 pages worth of masochistic abuse towards Katherina that at some point one has to wonder why she stays with him at all. Nothing new even happens. It is just the same thing over and over again of her own self-pity and his hellfire. The overall arc of their relationship (obsessive to toxic to abusive) is as banal as it is unbearable; I'm not sure why it took 300 pages for Erpenbeck to develop.

Finally, I found the central motif of this novel, symbolized in the God Kairos, to be undeveloped. Erpenbeck attempts to find luck admist her characters;

If her grandfather hadn't managed to flee on January 30, 1933 (...) Katherina wouldn't exist
[Insert one of the many times Katherina remarks about the luckiness of meeting Hans that fateful day at the train station]

And yet, it still falls flat. If we are truly to believe that this was a critical juncture of Katherina's life, why does the moment feel so isolated from her present day self? The novel quite literally starts off by saying that the events of the book are almost indecipherable now, lost to time

A long time ago, the papers in his boxes and those in her suitcase were speaking to each other. Now they're both speaking to time. A suitcase like that, cardboard boxes like that, full of middles and endings and beginnings, buried under decades' worth of dust

Ultimately, the only boon that Katherina receives from Kairos, the way I see it at least, is that she finally ended the relationship. Perhaps the critical juncture in this book is that her brain developed, and now that she is not 19 anymore, she realizes that Hans is not good for her. And yet, the novel ends with her still assumably in love with Hans. It's such a mess I'm not even sure what to make of it, and so I have to just chalk it up to it being a tragedy and move on.

This review was all over the place, but I feel that it is warranted given the book was too. Although I find it undeserving of the Booker Prize, I think there is a lot of good in here if it were edited a bit.