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 …
LONDON — German author Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann won the International Booker Prize for fiction Tuesday for “Kairos,” the story of a tangled love affair during the final years of East Germany’s existence. Erpenbeck said she hoped the book would help readers learn there was more to life in the now-vanished Communist country than depicted in “The Lives …
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German author Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann won the International Booker Prize for fiction Tuesday for “Kairos,” the story of a tangled love affair during the final years of East Germany’s existence. Ms. Erpenbeck said she hoped the book would help readers learn there was more to life in the now-vanished Communist country than depicted in ‘The Lives of …
