The Ukrainian writer Oksana Lutsyshyna should really have called her award-winning fourth novel Ivan, not Ivan and Phoebe. In one scene, Hans and Katharina have sex to the sound of an East German May Day parade, embarking on a "private emigration on the narrow bed." In that moment, Katharina's departure seems all but foretold - and yet who has not experienced intimacy as a radical private departure? Here and throughout, Kairos is a voyage far from the familiar, and toward the limits of what a novel can do. In poet and translator Michael Hofmann's rigorous translation, Kairos' writing feels purified, as if any emotional irrelevancy had been burned out. Its mix of intimacy and historical sweep is astounding. It would be too easy to take their relationship as an allegory for any sort of progress, and yet both the gaps between them and the nearness of their inner lives - Erpenbeck switches from his perspective to hers and back many times on each page, and often many times in a paragraph - manage to simultaneously echo and amplify the fissures between generations, and between East and West.Įrpenbeck is frequently named on lists of Nobel Prize contenders and, for newcomers to her work, Kairos easily demonstrates why. when she, just 19, first met Hans?" Kairos emerges from that question, traveling through memory to explore love and difference, the changing of historical seasons, and the crossing of borders both real and symbolic: Katharina and Hans' romance starts in East Berlin in the final years of Germany's division, in a moment when a starkly different future seems imminent. Considering the boxes, she wonders, "Was it a fortunate moment. Very soon after, she comes home to discover that somebody has delivered two boxes of his writings to her home in Pittsburgh. Kairos, by the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, opens with a middle-aged woman named Katharina learning that her former lover, Hans, who was some 30 years older than her, has died. On the other hand, Françoise Sagan's newly released The Four Corners of the Heart is a reflection of mid-20th-century French bourgeois society - but, primarily, an item of literary history: an incomplete and previously unknown work by a legendary writer. Kairos takes readers into the final days of divided Germany, while Ivan and Phoebe, only a couple years and countries away, portrays the wobbly first moments of Ukraine's post-Soviet independence. Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos and Oksana Lutsyshyna's Ivan and Phoebe offer this opportunity to connect with time past. But they cannot be completely divided.īesides the fact that literature comes with a rich history of its own, it can give readers access to the past that is not less valuable for being, to some degree, imaginary. It is easy to act as if fiction and history were separate.
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