Similarly,
Kairos – toxic love ruins:
Berlin is. Therefore, 80s: communism is agony, and an older man takes possession of a young woman as we conquer a territory.
Coverage in love in a world that disintegrates
Katharina is 19 years old. However, Hans, married state writer, has 34 more. Similarly, They meet by chance, on a bus, one day in July. For example, The attraction is immediate, brutal, almost unreal. Meanwhile, She quickly moves into her apartment – or rather in her life, her library, her requirements.
What she takes first for a sensual initiation turns, insidiously, into submission. Meanwhile, Hans is passionate, dominating, cruel. Furthermore, He reads his intimate newspapers without his knowledge, lowers her, watches her. For example, She lets herself be done. Meanwhile, Or believes to do it out of love.
Everything is there. Ambiguity, fascination, fear. And this slow self -integration that we accept, convinced kairos – toxic love ruins that this is the price to pay to be loved. Katharina fades. She agrees, then doubt, then resists … but too late. Abuse is already printed in his flesh and in his thought.
A novel from the fall, intimate and collective
More Kairos is not reduced to a destructive love story. It is also the portrait of a breathless diet, that of the finishing GDR. The novel is crossed by official speeches, propaganda sentences, state censorship – so many voices that contaminate spirits.
Hans himself is a double figure: heir to a socialist ideal, he also embodies the paranoid rigidity. As the wall vacillates, their relationship is disintegrated. Politicians and intimate, in Erpenbeck, keep dialogue.
And this title, Kairosis not trivial. It designates in ancient Greek the decisive moment, the opportunity to be seized. But here, it becomes almost ironic: nothing is seized, everything escapes. History, beings, promises.
The art kairos – toxic love ruins of the relentless
Jenny Erpenbeck, with his tense prose like a rope, never seeks the effect. No excessive lyricism or effusions: everything is selected, purified, surgical. And it is precisely this rigor that upsets. She writes pain without pathos, domination without caricature. The rhythm marries the upheavals of the heroine: the pages accelerate, then bother, like her spirit taken in the trap.
At times, we think of The wave of Todd Strasser or to A woman under influence of Cassavetes. Because that’s what it is about: a consciousness that vacillates under the pressure of a world too strong for it.
Kairos is an icing, disturbing, sometimes difficult novel. But it had to exist. Because he tells without detour what others barely suggest. Because it searches in the folds of the romantic grip and ideology with ruthless precision. And because, behind the darkness, perhaps hides a call-to resist, to name, to kairos – toxic love ruins free oneself.
To be published on August 28.
File – Chronicles of the Back to school books 2025, in preview
By Cécile Mazin
Contact : cm@actualitte.com
Further reading: “A happy outcome”: in Brittany, the stock of Coop Breizh books taken up by Palémon – “Queers families”, a book to show the diversity of LGBT+ families – AULON. The Memoirs of the village now in a book – Between real, fantastic and barjot – Book: “Crashs: these accidents that save your life” – Aeronautical news.