Kairos

Erpenbeck (Go, Went, Gone) sets the dissolution of a May-December romance against the backdrop of German reunification in her solemn and subtle latest. After a former lover dies in the present day, Katharina receives two boxes of diaries, tapes, and souvenirs that chronicle their relationship from decades earlier. Erpenbeck then flashes back to 1986, when Katharina, as a 19-year-old student in East Berlin, starts an affair with Hans, a married writer. The relationship is intense, physically and emotionally, especially after she admits to a brief fling with a younger man. Now, while listening to Hans's tapes, Katharina reckons with the depth of Hans's sexual and psychological control over her life ("So far as I am concerned, your deception is the greatest and most critical defeat of my life," he says to her on one of the vitriolic recordings). Their relationship is marked by the tension between beginnings and endings, love and hate, truth and deception, freedom and repression. It's also a struggle of wills between two generations with a very different experience of the crumbling Socialist state. This audacious dissection of unruly forces demonstrates how endings are already present in every personal or political beginning, however promising. (June)

A thorny love affair and a momentous historical moment combine in this novel by prizewinning German playwright and author Erpenbeck, author of Go, Went, Gone (2017), etc. Structured as a series of flashbacks, the novel begins with news of a funeral. Cut to East Berlin in the 1980s and a chance encounter on a public bus. Katharina, 19, meets Hans, a married writer 10 years older than her father. Erpenbeck evokes their early all-consuming passion, fueled by sex and a shared love of music and art, and deftly overlaps their points of view. "Why a love that has to be kept secret can make a person so much happier than one that can be talked about is something she wishes she could understand....Perhaps because a secret is not spent on the present, but keeps its full force for the future? Or is it something to do with the potential for destruction that one suddenly has?" As time passes, rifts and menaces appear. The lovers, from different generations, have experienced different Germanies. "Only a very thin layer of soil is spread over the bones, the ashes of the incinerated victims," Katharina thinks. "There is no other walking, ever, for a German than over the skulls." From her apartment in Berlin, she can see the Berlin Wall. Erpenbeck's handling of characters caught within the mesh (and mess) of history is superb. Threats loom over their love and over their country. Hans is jealous, weak-willed, vindictive, Katharina self-abasing. At heart the book is about cruelty more than passion, about secrets, betrayal, and loss; it's at its best as the Wall comes down. "Everything is collapsing," Erpenbeck writes. "The landscape between the old that is being abolished and the new that is yet to be installed is a landscape of ruins." The personal and the political echo artfully in the last years of the German Democratic Republic. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.