Kairos is a novel published in German in 2021 by Jenny Erpenbeck. The story became the first written by a German author to win the International Booker Prize which honors both the author and translator of a foreign language book that has been translated into English. Thus, the prize was shared between Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hoffman.
In addition to that prestigious literary award, Kairos also won the Uwe Johnson Award which recognizes "outstanding literary works in which there are links to the poetics of Uwe Johnson.” Erpenbeck and Hoffman were also shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature.
Kairos tells the story of the romance between a middle-aged married writer named Hans and a nineteen-year-old young woman named Katharina. Set in Berlin in the mid-eighties, the relationship is challenged not just by the age gap and infidelity issues on both sides but by tyrannical political ideologies of Nazi fascism and Soviet bloc communism. Just as the literal concrete Berlin Wall came to define post-WWII Germany so do all these differences between the aging man and the vibrant woman with her whole future ahead combine to create a metaphorical wall between them.
The chairperson overseeing the judging which awarded the novel the Booker Prize remarked that the story relates the “complexity of a relationship between a young student and a much older writer, tracking the daily tensions and reversals that mark their intimacy.” One of the judges responsible for choosing Kairos as the Booker winner noted that the book offers an “uncomfortable and complex” portrait “about the weight of history and how it impinges on our lives.”
Regarding how her characters can be seen as representatives of political oppressive, Erpenbeck describes the novel as “a private story of a big love and its decay, but it’s also a story of the dissolution of a whole political system.”
