KAIROS, by Jenny Erpenbeck. Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann.
The first thing to know about Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, “Kairos,” is that it’s a wallow. I was in the mood for one. It’s a cathartic leak of a novel, a beautiful bummer, and the floodgates open early.
Iris Murdoch described the shedding of tears as “usually an action with a purpose, a contribution even to a conversation.” Samuel Beckett took a dimmer view. He wondered if tears were “liquefied brain.”
In “Kairos,” which is about a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man, the tears are of every sort: smart and stupid, ugly and otherwise, precipitated by pleasure, pain, laughter, confusion.
This is East Berlin in the late 1980s, just before the fall of the wall. The young woman, Katharina, is a theater design student. Her eyes are described as “fishy”; at the start, she is 19.
Hans, a 50-something novelist and high-minded writer for radio, is handsome and rangy, and he looks fine with a cigarette. Katharina doesn’t like to weep in front of him, so when she anguishes one evening over a coming internship that will keep her in Frankfurt for a year, she waits until he steps out to run some errands:
She takes advantage of his absence and cries now. Cries as she vacuums, cries as she cleans the kitchen, cries in the bathroom as she scrubs the shower and sink, only briefly stops crying when she goes to take the empty bottles downstairs and starts to cry the minute she’s back in the apartment, cries as she takes down the pictures which she and Hans hung up together.
To witness someone else’s tears is not necessarily to be moved yourself. But to absorb “Kairos” is — like reading “Wuthering Heights” or “On Chesil Beach,” listening to albums like Lou Reed’s “Berlin” or Tracey Thorn’s “A Distant Shore,” watching the film “Truly, Madly, Deeply” or ingesting an ideal edible — to set yourself on a gentle downward trajectory.
If “Kairos” were only a tear-jerker, there might not be much more to say about it. But Erpenbeck, a German writer born in 1967 whose work has come sharply to the attention of English-language readers over the past decade, is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have.