What is love? One can answer this question in many ways. However, in a relationship, as persons, one tends to let another intrude and control their own life. Love and freedom are two words that are not easily put together when it comes to a relationship.
Kairos – written by Jenny Erpenbeck in German and translated into English by Micheal Hofmann – which won the International Booker Prize 2024, touches deeply and mildly the point.
Katharina is a nineteen-year-old student who lived in the time where Germany still had East and West. The infamous Berlin wall was standing tall between East and West. While living her life in East Germany, where Freedom was limited to some extent, she found a lover, who was almost thirty-four-years older than her. Hans was a writer who had a wife and a son.
The story begins when they meet in a bus in East Germany and suddenly fall in love. Gradually, their bond became tied and Hans dominated their relationship. Hans grew up in Hitler’s time and his childhood traumas living in post-World War II Germany, gave him some serious mental health issues. When their relationship grew increasingly toxic, Katharina was the victim of that but she always found a reason to love Hans.
Hans was addicted to Katharina, even though he betrayed his wife he couldn’t stand when Katharina found someone else. This enigma of love is unexplainable and unspeakable, yet most of us have gone through this in our life.
The story continues with the political tension around while people struggle about freedom and the novel is aligned with the main political events happening at that time. The reader could walk in East Germany in the 80’s which does not exist today. Writing about the novel Neel Mukherjee said, “An allegory of her nation, a country that has ceased to exist.”
Hans was old and it is understandable his fears of losing her while Katharina was in her naïve youth loved him as the love of her life. She wanted to live like his wife, so that’s why she cooked for him when they were in her apartment alone. His fears came to light when he said, “Shame that I won’t be around to watch her when she’s an old woman.”
Deep political issues
It is clear this is not just doomed romance but deep layers of the novel weaving deep political issues together at that time. With enough details of East Germany, even a reader who would not want to go for Google Search, will be able to read the novel peacefully.
Michael Hofmann’s translation is smooth and captures the tone of the novel beautifully. He kept German words to connect the reader into the culture of the original setting. The Booker Prize Judges said, “Michael Hofmann’s translation captures the eloquence and eccentricities of Erpenbeck’s writing, the rhythm of its run-on sentences, the expanse of her emotional vocabulary.”
Hofmann is a translator, poet, and critic. Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Hans Fallada are among the German writers he has translated. He has been a part-time instructor at the University of Florida in Gainesville since 1993. In 2018, the year Jenny Erpenbeck was first on the International Booker Prize longlist, he served as a judge. He was chosen as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
Jenny Erpenbeck, an award-winning novelist, playwright, and opera director, was born in East Berlin in 1967. Prior to studying musical theatre direction and beginning a prosperous career as an opera director in the late 1990s, she worked as a bookbinder and then as a manager of theatrical props. Geschichte vomalten Kind, her first novella, was released in 1999. The Old Child, Susan Bernofsky’s English translation, came out in 2005.
