For Germany, I read Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. In 2024, this book won the International Booker Prize, and damn, it truly deserved the honor.
Kairos is the story of a passionate but difficult love affair that takes place in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s. Katharina is only nineteen years old when she meets Hans, who is married and ten years older than her father. He moved to Berlin during World War II; she has only ever known a city divided into East and West by one of the most famous walls in history.
As I began Kairos, I was swept back in time to 1999 when I studied history for a semester in London. Over a long weekend, I visited Berlin with my friend Amy, who was studying French in Paris. We visited the remains of the Wall, had coffee in a posh old hotel, nearly saw Barry White in concert, and had an unfortunate encounter with jellied meat. It’s always exciting to read a book for a country I’ve already had the luck to visit IRL. I went looking for my old photos but couldn’t find them, but if and when I dig them up, I’ll post them here. (Since I took these photos when I was in college, there’s a chance they were absorbed into my parents’ boxes of photos, and if that happened, my Berlin photos were unfortunately lost in the Palisades Fire.)
Back to Kairos! I loved this book for so many reasons — the analysis of life in East Berlin; the character development; the dissection of a disastrous love affair — but what I really want to talk about is the STYLE.
Many, many years ago, when I was in the 11th grade, my English teacher was a self-righteous grump who spent several lessons lecturing about “writing style.” I don’t remember much of what he said (it was 1995!!) but I do recall a handout that listed “icons with style,” and the list included David Bowie and Madonna. We were exhorted to write an essay that exhibited our own personal writing style, and after reading our essays, the teacher declared NONE OF YOU HAVE STYLE, with an undertone indicating that we should be deeply ashamed of ourselves and give up on any ambitions we had to be writers.
For years after this class, I was haunted by the fear that my writing lacked style. Ugh. Like doctors, all writer teachers should be admonished, above all, TO DO NO HARM.
It’s been thirty years since I absorbed those unfortunate lectures on writing style, but I’d like to take this opportunity to get a few thoughts off my chest: (1) my teacher was a pompous jerk; (2) you can’t expect teenagers to have finely honed their own writing style; and (3) my teacher was probably a frustrated writer who puffed up his own ego by telling his students that they weren’t any good.
That was a bit of a tangent, but I swear, I’m getting back to Kairos. As much as I was traumatized by my teacher’s lecture on writing style, he did impress upon me its importance. There’s no mathematical equation to determine whether an author has style, but I do know this: Kairos has it in spades. It’s not flashy, or self-consciously clever, but Erpenbeck’s writing style does feel deeply intentional. The prose, as translated by Michael Hofmann, is fragmented and fluid at the same time. There’s a rhythm to it that at first felt like nails on a chalkboard but but after reading a few pages, I surrendered and let the writing carry me along until I found myself wondering, Why aren’t all books written this way?
Erpenbeck has this way of writing a paragraph that captures a character’s inner and outer world. We get snippets of dialogue and then flashes of inner monologue; sensory details of a restaurant or train and then feelings related to the love affair. A single paragraph might touch on a dozen different moments but it manages to weave them together into a single feeling, or thought, or epiphany. I’m not going to even attempt to quote a passage from Kairos because the book is a symphony, each sentence playing its own dissonant tune, yet somehow coming together to create a novel of haunting beauty. I’d be doing you and Erpenbeck a huge disservice if I tried to capture the book’s style in a single passage.
Kairos was absolutely extraordinary, and I’m so glad I picked it for my quest–but full disclosure: it was really difficult to pick a single book for Germany! There’s just so many possibilities. I’ve already decided to listen to the audiobook for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few months, I look back and realize Kairos was the beginning of a German side quest.