The translator this time is Michael Hofmann. I can see that to understand Erpenbeck’s power, I have to start in her toolshed: with her metaphors, so quick and provocative. As for the Swedish Academy, I’ll leave the choice to them, but I can say that the novel speaks to all of Europe, where it’s come from and where it’s going, in ways reminiscent of the recent Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Erpenbeck’s longest fiction yet, its two protagonists are presented in straightforward chronology (earlier episodes occur in flashback), and I finished the book convinced that she had outdone herself. 2020), but Kairos asserts itself at once as part of Go, Went, Gone’s artistic progression. This success prompted publication of a wide-ranging selection of essays, Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces (2019 English trans. The novel proved a sensation, winning a number of awards and prompting critics like James Wood to put the still-young German author (born in 1967) on their short list for a Nobel. Their displacement moves a retired German professor, an Easterner and Slav who has himself lost a home, and he tries to help. The drama had a rare focus-African refugees in Berlin. 2017), however, Erpenbeck worked up a narrative more linear and character-driven. In the subsequent Go, Went, Gone (2015 English trans. That text ranks with the finest fictional experiments of the current generation, as inventive as Italo Calvino structurally and yet rooted in grim realities such as the Holocaust. 2014), both unconventional short novels with no major protagonist-or more precisely, in the case of Days, the same protagonist living different lifetimes. 2010) and The End of Days (2012 English trans. She swept through decades of European upheaval in her first pair of books, Visitation (2008 English trans. The uproar of 1988–89 resounds across their affair, rendering the couple’s breakdown both more fascinating in itself and more richly significant for the entire previous century.Įrpenbeck’s fiction is forever brooding on the turbulence of history, the way it disfigures everyone in its path. It follows a couple doomed from the first: their romance is not only May-December and extramarital, but it’s also unfolding in East Berlin just as both city and country are getting wiped from the map. The novel has a lot going on, to be sure, and in fact none of these three citations mention what may be its primary concern: essentially, Kairos is a love story. Here’s Kairos on a second major theme, history: “here is no other walking, ever, for a German than over the skulls, eyes, mouths, and skeletons,” and “each step stirs these depths.” And here (while again nodding to identity and history), the text broods on art: “To slice away the emotion from yourself, and put it on a slide under a microscope, that was art in this bloody goddamned twentieth century.” The alacrity of Erpenbeck’s prose never flags throughout. In just two sentences, they assert a rhetoric of rare intelligence and imagination, along with the ability to turn on a dime. The text keeps coming back to the question of identity the passage above follows up by changing the analogy, unsettlingly: “Did you have any control over what you saw in the mirror?” The metaphors are vivid yet volatile-one moment a test tube, the next a mirror image, each expressed in active terms. “WAS A HUMAN BEING just a container to be filled by time with whatever it happens to have handy?” Such unstable compounds fill everyone in Kairos, the magnificent new novel from German author Jenny Erpenbeck.
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