Every year, I am doing my best to follow various longlists, particularly International Booker Prize and the German-speaking equivalent, but obviously, I always succeed few titles a year. I usually keep the TBR for the next years, with more and more titles added on every year.
For this year longlist, I succeeded to acquire at least half of it, and although not all of them will make it into the short list to be announced on the 9th of April. However, my one of only until now, was a book by a German author, Jenny Erpenbeck - Kairos, that Í´ve listened to read by the author herself, in the original German language version.
Set on the changing political and social landscape of the end of the German Democratic Republic, Kairos is a story told through the voice of Katharina. At 19, she met a relatively famous writer in his 50s, Hans, and for years they secretly date. There are ups and downs, social pressure and psychoanalitical dependencies in a world in turmoil.
I noticed lately a certain temptation outside Germany to love and appreciate exactly such novels, with a strange love story and some rich German-German history details. Especially when one may be new to such encounters - historical ones, I mean - such a plot may make the love story tensed and mysterious. However, although the historical details were interesting, but the love story horizontally developed and very much mundane, uninteresting - I could not find any literary attraction in the story.
Kairos is for me one of those novels that I may like the writing and the voice - and its echoes - of the characters, nevertheless I´ve found the story itself completely unappealing. Definitely not my kind of love story as well.
I hope until the 9th of April to have the chance to read at least another book from the longlist and hopefully my feelings about this exquisite literary event will also change.
Rating: 3 stars
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