The Feminist Book Club 2/7

16.04.2025

Jenny Erpenbeck - Kairos, 2021.

From this session until the end of the season we read and discuss the recommendations of the participants. The first one is Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, a contemporary German writer, was born in East Berlin in 1967. She has been awarded numerous prestigious literary prizes for her novels – including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (2001), the GEDOK Prize (2004), the Hans Falada Prize (2014), the Independent Magazine Award for Foreign Fiction (2015), the Thomas Mann Prize (2016), the Strega Prize (2017), and in 2018 she was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize.

The novel Kairos (2021) tells a conventional love story between an older man, a not very successful writer, and a younger girl, set in 1980s East Berlin. However, the way the story is told makes this novel interesting and stimulates discussion, as the narrative is structured from a later perspective through the memorabilia that the protagonist finds in the boxes. Furthermore, the narrative, told alternately from her perspective and his, contains a variety of cultural references and negotiates autopoietic reflections on literature and writing, unconventional models of cohabitation, and skillfully builds parallel narratives about the construction and dissolution of a relationship and a broader social system, from a dark family past to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fate of writing and the writer under turbulent political circumstances.

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