Jenny Erpenbeck

This is my third Erpenbeck novel, and I continue to enjoy her writing style, quirks and all - so far all the books feature a lake as brooding presence, sometimes beautiful and scenic, but also usually with a dark and threatening aspect. She is also the master of the non sequitur that actually conveys mood and meaning.
This book is about African asylum seekers in Germany. We learn about what drove them from Africa, how they survived the deadly sea crossing, and how they end up mired in EU, and German, bureaucracy by being in Germany after first landing in Italy.
The story is told with passion and compassion, but it is tough to make a novel out of such polarized political stances.… (altro)

Richard is a widower, a retired professor of Classics in Berlin and the former East Germany. His life seems - to him as well - somewhat purposeless. One day he happens upon a demonstration in town by a group of refugees from various African nations who have camped out there. This is a world of which Ricard knows nothing, but his interest is piqued, and gradually, reluctantly at first, but then with increasing passion, he comes to know them and something of their stories. Of their families, lost to them, or killed in frightening circumstances. His life acquires a purpose: helping the men fight their corners, seeking funding. He discovers his own country's dark past, the prejudices still alive and powerful among politicians, many of the general population and his own friends. He finds a legal situation where each country with whom the asylum seekers have contact have a get-out clause enabling them to move these men on to somewhere else. This quietly, lyrically told told but urgent story is an indictment of that system. Absolutely nothing has got better since 2017, when this novel was published. Required reading for Suella Braverman.… (altro)

19. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
reader: Lisa Flanagan
OPD: 2021, translation: from German by Michael Hofmann (2023)
format: 10:25 audible audiobook (336 pages in hardcover)
acquired: Mar 21 listened: Mar 21 – Apr 5
rating: 4
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker2024
locations: East Berlin 1980’s, 1990’s
about the author: German author and opera director, born in East Berlin in 1967

My 3rd from the International Booker Longlist (the shortlist comes out Tuesday). This one, from an East Berlin-born author, captures the atmosphere of East Berlin in the last years before the wall came down.

I really enjoyed this. There’s a creepy aspect to get past - the relationship of a 19 yr old girl and a 53 yr old married man with a son. You will need to come to some terms with that if you want to get through this.

What i enjoyed was how the history and the times were reflected in and echoed through this relationship. I don’t think the relationship was purely symbolic. It had its own life. But the nature of it demands comparison and consideration in that light. Hans, born in 1933, was shaped by Nazi Germany without the guilt of compliance. He experienced all the post-ww2 mess, displacement, Soviet control and Iron Curtain isolation. Pre-and-post stasi, if you like. Katarina was born in 1967 in East Berlin. She’s always known the wall and East Germany is her entire experience.

Their relationship, the way they embrace, the ways they tangle and struggle, do various things, and the way it evolves after the fall of the wall, in each of them it reflects their histories and what they have experienced and know. I found that kind of beautiful.

I was fascinated by the nature of being in this East Berlin in the waning days of the GDR. It's hard to capture. Erpenbeck's version is ominous and unoptimistic, but there is also something stable about it, a lack of chaos, a slower pace allowing a different sense of art and history. This was quickly lost in unification.

I want to mention the prose. It works but has an unusual technique. It’s largely an odd prose of association where adjacent sentences are referencing different things. Paragraphs become collages of mixed association. You can still follow what’s going on without trouble. I found this is much easier to see on the page when I borrowed a library copy. But I used audio, and it was intense trying to mix it all while still taking in the main storyline. The audio production is very good, but I definitely missed stuff.

All three books so far from the International Booker longlist have left me in slightly odd state, a feeling of reading something different and unfamiliar, creating some distance between myself and the book. Strange.

Anyway, this is a nice novel, if you can tolerate the core relationship.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/358760#8498763… (altro)