Review: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is suffused with a sense of grief. There is no better description of the feeling the novel evokes than Katharina’s own words: “This, she thinks, feels like getting on a sleigh and setting off down a mountainside, which you know will end in an abyss.” East Berlin in 1990. The soul of the novel is the contrast between East and West Berlin, Katharina’s youth and Hans’ old age. After visiting a West Berlin sex shop for the first time, she observes, “Freedom down there is perpetrating a massacre… And if the fulfilment of desires here is only a matter of price, doesn’t all desire convert into one desire, for cash?” But the author makes sure the reader cannot separate one from the other completely. As everything slithers down, these lines, repeated throughout the novel, reverberate in the reader’s mind: “Anticipation is even better than the thing itself”.