What is it about?
Kairos is a novel about a country that no longer exists, written like it is about a love affair that probably never should have started. And that is where its greatness lies.
Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann won the 2024 International Booker prize for Erpenbeck’s “personal and political” novel , translated by Hofmann from German.
Kairos doesn’t treat East Germany as a backdrop; she treats it as an experiment — a state that lived and died within the span of a single generation. What happens to people who built their sense of self inside something that disappears? And what does it do to their memories, their loyalties, their understanding of love and betrayal?
The brilliance of this book lies in how Erpenbeck lets the romance and the nation speak to each other without ever forcing the analogy. A relationship defined by asymmetry, belief, and self-delusion sits beside a political project built on those same fault lines. Both are held together by an ethos that initially feels noble: discipline, seriousness, commitment, the promise of becoming a finer version of oneself. And both unravel not through one dramatic event but through a slow accumulation of distortions that eventually make truth impossible to uphold.
This is why Kairos demands so much thought. It stays with you long after the read. Erpenbeck is asking what it means to place faith in a structure — a state, a lover, an idea — that cannot sustain the ideals that created it. The result is sheer emotional devastation.
Why we loved it!
The quiet inescapable power of Kairos comes from the way Erpenbeck treats personal and political failure and complete collapse, as parallel movements. She writes the affair in direct efficient prose, showing how affection erodes under the weight of imbalance — an older man shaping the world for a younger woman who wants to believe she chose freely. Every detail of their relationship echoes the GDR: the discipline that becomes rigidity, the devotion that becomes surveillance, the hope that congeals into nostalgia. Erpenbeck’s restraint is the book’s greatest strength. Nothing is really spelled out; everything accumulates. The tiny anniversaries, the repeated cycles of guilt and forgiveness, the revision of memory — all of it feels painfully true. And beneath the surface is the deeper question: how do people rebuild themselves after the structure that organised their emotional life collapses? What happens to art when ideology collides with triumphant capitalism?
What might not work, sometimes
Erpenbeck’s knowledge of theatre, the Opera and music is vast. Having career as a director of Opera and a successful career in it through the 90s- the book does have a lot of music and Opera references that might escape the reader who is not comfortable with the art. A trick is to treat it as Sound Track and things do fall in place. Also, Erpenbeck refuses easy release. Some readers will want momentum or catharsis; she offers neither. The repetitions, the emotional loops, the deliberate flatness of certain admissions — all mirror exactly how such relationships degrade. This is not a flaw, just an uncomfortable fidelity to reality. For readers who prefer dramatic arcs, this may feel a little stifling. But that is precisely what gives the novel its force.
Why you should read it
Kairos is essential if you are interested in how private lives absorb political histories without ever articulating them. It is one of the rare novels that asks you to think about belief — who we become inside it, and who we become when it breaks. As a nation and as a person. As an idea and as love. Maybe, nostalgia is not longing for a lost state or a lost lover; it is longing for the version of ourselves we were inside that story. Erpenbeck writes this with extraordinary restraint, letting the reader feel the instability long before the characters recognise it. Read this if you are drawn to fiction that takes relationships seriously, not as plots but as systems. It stays with you because it refuses to simplify the questions it raises.
Score: 10 / 10 (yes!)
Babel School of Languages 