The first page of International Booker Prize winner Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck is excellent. In dialogue without quotation marks or attribution, someone asks, “Will you come to my funeral?” It’s a great opening line, and the interlocutor resists answering directly but he wears her down and she responds, “Sure [...] I’ll come to your funeral” (5). Four months later, on her birthday, she gets news of his death. She doesn’t go to his funeral. Instead, she puts together a series of musical selections and listens in private.
It’s a fantastic opening, but my view of the novel overall is much more conflicted, more challenging to articulate. Here’s the premise: at the start of the novel, Katharina is a nineteen year old girl who has a chance encounter with a much older man (older even than her father) and it leads to a fast and furious romance—ick! What is presented as rose-tinted romance glosses over a seriously concerning relationship, even when it’s at its best. When it is at its worst, well, it’s even more explicitly egregious. Hans is an exacting partner with BDSM proclivities and a domineering attitude. At one point, Katharina sleeps with a more age-appropriate partner and when Hans discovers the truth, he becomes incensed, paranoid, obsessive. He abuses her verbally and physically, he “celebrates” anniversaries of her betrayal, accuses her of the worst—and all this despite the fact that Hans is himself married and that his romance with Katharina is already an affair. There’s a self-destructive impulse that seems to motivate his attitudes, similar in some ways to Marcel Proust’s The Captive and the Fugitive.
All of this takes place against the backdrop of Cold War Germany, with Katharina and Hans being on the East, Soviet side. That context flavours the text and peppers it with some additional tension, which Erpenbeck, in my mind, doesn’t fully capitalize on until the final act of the book, and only in the epilogue does it seem immediately pertinent to the characters in question—the “twist” ending adding a layer to the narrative that warrants some consideration (but I won’t spoil it right away).
There are two areas where the book most shines: the characterization and the style. Erpenbeck’s tone is finely wrought. In some areas, the phrasing is precise and even terse. In others, there are clear flourishes and the arrangement of short bursts in the writing are poetic. There’s a philosophical bent to the text that makes it feel rich and worth reading even when the initial romance of the text fizzles.
There’s a great moment early on where the lovers are talking and, as creepy as it is, Hans has memories of her as an (even younger) child and it points to the disconnect of memory. Hans comments on her childhood hairstyle and Erpenbeck writes that “only a decade ago, her mother was sitting by her bedside reading cautionary tales from Struwwelpeter to her till she fall asleep; he sets down the spoon and shakes out a cigarette. Do you smoke? No. She remembers the cut-off pigtail, and the demonstration and the shame she felt at going out in public looking so mutilated. But she had forgotten that her mother had set her on her shoulders and carried her past the podium to comfort her” (14). The moment is punctuated by Katharina’s reflection: “Strange [...] all these years a little bit of my life has gone on existing in this stranger’s head. And now he’s given it back to me” (14). This notion of being given your identity back after having lost it and that your identity is spread out among strangers is a compelling picture of identity. Then about fifteen pages later, there’s a reversal. Instead of Hans remembering something about her she forgot, she tells him that her grandfather used to take her fishing when she was little. Then, “He has a sudden vision of her sitting on a pier, bare legs dangling, holding a fishing rod. The power of a simple sentence like that, he thinks. Makes you see something, whether you want to or not” (26). There’s a reversal where Hans now sees the past without having actually seen it, where he projects an image of her identity backward.
Admittedly, some (and I use that word with extreme caution) of the moments in the text are romantic in their own twisted way. One morning, Katharina is leaving the apartment and Hans runs to his bookcase. He comes back with a book, and then carefully tears out a page that he then presents to her. He tells her to read it later “but she can’t wait past the moment when he’s waved goodbye to her on the first bend of the stairs and closed the front door behind him” (61). She reads the passage and it’s a romantic poem, which is fine, but I like her response even better: “Has he gone back to his room and already put the book back? The page she is holding will always be missing from it. That gap, she thinks, is the first trace of her in his world” (61). There’s a kind of romance to this idea that she exists as a trace in his life, that there’s an artifact that shows his affection for her. That said, it is tempered by much more caution. What does it mean, for example, that her existence is an absence? What she is is a gap. In some ways it makes me think of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, since he sets the terms of her existence, partially through her erasure. One of their traditions is that Hans holds out Katharina’s coat and she puts her arms in the wrong way so that she can position for a hug. Even when the relationship is completely fraught, “there is one thing they still do that hasn’t changed: when they leave a place together, he holds out her coat, she slips into it frontwise, briefly holds him in her arms, then slips it off and puts it on the right way around. But probably even these habits, in which they took pleasure and pride, and which confirmed their intimacy, are nothing more than a hollow-bellied Trojan horse” (195). Once again there’s an image of emptiness—their affection is a gap. So, even when there is a hint of romance, there’s a kind of performativity to it devoid of meaning.
Actually, the book is more Lolita-like when considering that Hans takes such control over Katharina in the middle of the book, literally dictating her words for her when she has to write a letter to another man. His paranoia is reminiscent of Humbert Humbert going on a road trip across America, pulling Delores out of school or moving cities when he suspects her of having a connection to someone other than him. When Hans discovers Katharina’s betrayal (remember: HE IS MARRIED), he berates her in a sickening way that is perfectly wrought. I’ll quote the passage at length here as Hans professes that he will save their relationship, but grinds her into nothing at the same time. Note her complete demoralization, even becoming just a “bumpy head” by synecdoche:
Katarina nods with her intact skull, only her ideas are concussed.
If I am to try and rescue us, then I must approach the clarification of this matter like a job.
The bumpy head looks down and nods.
Then from now on everything regarding your time in Frankfurt is material for my investigation.
The bumpy head looks down and nods.
I need to understand what happened. If I don’t understand, it could happen a second time. And then I’m lost.
The bumpy head looks down and nods.
If you are not honest with me to the bottom of your soul, then our love doesn’t stand a chance.
Our love, that is, he is her and she is him. The bumpy head looks down and nods. She’s just a colony, a periphery of his. Flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood.
I can only do this work if you are totally honest: expose your diaries, your notebooks, everything you jotted down, all your letters.
The bumpy head looks down and nods.
Everything you failed to record or referred to in some different way you must complete in accordance with the truth.
The bumpy head looks down and nods.
Think about it: Anything you don’t tell me now, anything that remains in the dark, that you don’t reveal, anything like that remains undissolved and will work against us. Against us, against me, but most of all against you.
I know, says the bumpy head, looks down and nods.
That night, Hans writes to Katharina again:
I implore you, don’t be a coward. (170).
The passage is chilling. Hans demands to interrogate her, literally wanting to know everything is about her “transgression.” The relationship is approached almost as a political task, a building up of a revolution from the ground up. What makes the passage so gross to me is her dehumanization and then her absorption into him: “he is her and she is him,” “She’s just a colony, a periphery of his,” “F;esh of his flesh blood of his blood.” The grandeur and religiosity is particularly gross.
Hans then forces Katharina to write to a man she’s been intimate with to end their relationship. He dictates to her, so much so that she is no longer her own person with her own voice:
Then sit down here, and I’ll show you how to put an end to a relationship like that, if you’re at all serious about your remorse that is.
I am serious.
Then take a pencil and a piece of paper and make a start: “Vadim---”
Can’t I say, “Dear Vadim”?
Are you serious?
All right, then, just “Vadim.”
Now write: “You only wanted a fuck, and so did I.”
I can’t write that.
So you want him to trail after you forever?
No.
Think about it.
She writes.
Next: “It was all right, but I’ve had better.”
I would never say anything like that, he’ll tell right away that it’s not from me.
He’ll see your handwriting and believe you, just as I believed all the lies you wrote me.
She writes.
“So save yourself the trouble.”
He’s not a bad person.
Oh, I’m moved.
This will hurt him.
It’s meant to. It’s about securing an outcome.
She writes.
Write: “Katharina.”
She writes: Katharina.
Hans shudders at the sight of her signature.
Henceforth, he says, I’d like you to type all your letters to me. I can’t stand the sight of your handwriting.
Katharina nods mutely, without looking up. (174)
Hans replaces her voice with his own to dictate her life. I think one of the saddest things is that Hans forces her to type her letters. The intimacy of her handwriting becomes an affront to him and he dictates abusive letters onto a cassette tape, which he delivers to her and to which she must respond. It’s painful watching them have dinner, for example, and then he gives her the tape that will berate her once again. Erpenbeck writes, “He doesn’t even want to keep a diary anymore. She has smashed his memory, and there is no future in sight. When he meets her in the café, he sits down at her table without saying hello, as if there were no time anymore, no going away and no coming back, no looking back and no anticipation either, as though they were both locked into a lightless labyrinth in which they sometimes met, sometimes not” (178).
To highlight for a moment the poetic nature of Erpenbeck’s text, I’d like to point to a few moments in the work that stand out. In one moment, Katharina “has no eyes for the people coming in, neither the man in the white overalls, nor the ladies who go into the cubicles, nor does she see the mother and child. [...] No, she is clasping her two hands around Hans’s face, and pressing right up against him, so that he and she with mouths and noses and closed eyes are all alone together in a room made of skin” (138). That line about being alone together in a room made of skin is so disgusting, so intimate, so insular. It’s an engaging phrase—and then Erpenbeck follows up with a list of memories they ask each other about: “do you remember…” over and over, almost like a list poem. Later, Erpenbeck describes how “Suddenly time is a steel corset” (264) and it strikes me how much of the poetic lines deal with issues of confinement.
Part of the drama of the novel, actually, is watching how the seeds of the relationship already lay the groundwork of disaster. Even in the beginning, there is a constant accounting process that does not bode well. What is presented romantically foreshadows the demanding nature of Hans as a partner: “So they tell each other—and tell themselves—everything about the way it was, three weeks ago, when they first met. Some things they both know, some one of them has forgotten, or the other, some one of them didn’t notice, or the other, some one of them thought but didn’t say, and some the other, and so what was present just three weeks ago deepens in the course of an afternoon, deepens, changes its nature, and yet keeps its overall outline which both of them recognize” (63). At least in the beginning, the process is collaborative. They share their memory and develop self-understanding as a team, but they mark such minutiae anniversaries. Hans in particular prides himself on sharing particular pieces of music with Katharina, which he then refuses to listen to when she “ruins” the memory of them.
The toxicity of the relationship becomes increasingly clear. Hans is an author and Katharina goes to bed: “She knows that it’s perfectly possible that while she’s asleep he’s maybe writing the sentences that will sunder them. Just when the bill for everything is due, just before their wishes become reality, everything is once more up for grabs, teetering at the top and maybe about to collapse, she knows that” (113). She recognizes the tenuousness, and it actually seems that both her and Hans thrive on that uncertainty. They need to be “teetering on the edge” to provide the relationship with meaning. They fail to be comfortable: “Yesterday, he fell asleep with her, two spoons on the narrow bed, and she thought she had never been happier in her life. But sometimes he clings on to her too hard. Sometimes he says: I feel tense—and that means she has to take her clothes off. And other times it’s so perfect she could die. What does she want from him? […] He thought he was addicted to her, he wrote not long ago, and she thought, no, she’s addicted to making him addicted” (113). The relationship is a complex powerplay of domination and submission that never quite reaches stasis.
It’s hard to identify precisely why the relationship feels like it aligns with the history of Germany. In the final act of the book, there’s a bit more explicit discussion of the changes in Germany (especially because there’s a time-jump ahead to after the fall of the Berlin wall.) I suppose there’s a comparable philosophy for Hans: he cannot handle changes to arrangements. He tries to calcify everything in his relationship with Katharina and resist changes in their dynamics. When the wall falls, he is with his wife, Ingrid, who had been out protesting “a moribund East German regime” (265). Hans does not protest and they have the following exchange: “I don’t understand you, she had said to him that night, now at last we’re in a position to change something. Well, you change away, Hans had replied. Her protest today, by contrast, strikes her as pathetic, futile. Is this what freedom feels like? Not having an enemy you can put a name to? She is grateful to Hans for not saying anything” (265). He wants to resist change, but it also seems to be true for him that the freedom of not having an enemy is less liberatory than confining. Hans seems his most liberated to do as he pleases when he can point to a specific enemy that threatens his relationship with Katharina. Incidentally, there’s a moment when he pretends to have spoken directly to the man Katharina cheated with and tells her all the things he said, which she denies and denies and denies before he finally admits that he invented the encounter and that all the things he mentioned were his own imagination and he just had to confirm.
Despite all of the denials, Hans cannot trust Katharina for anything. Even when sleeping with her, she is forced to respond to accusations that he gives her on cassette: “The day before yesterday, she gave him her answers to the second cassette, but he hasn’t read them yet. He said, what if she just serves up a fresh helping of lies, now that she’s gotten in the habit of deceiving him [...] You know, he says to Katharina, and brushes the ash off, even if we’re sometimes fleetingly happy, it doesn’t feel like a new start to me. It just feels like a really long farewell” (188). It’s lines like that that I feel can be read on multiple registers. It’s a depressing idea for any relationship, of course, but the idea of a revolution being more of a long farewell seems like it might hold true, especially with the paranoiac parallels of Soviet spies and the Cold War, etc. Jeeze, if this had been published before my Master’s, this would have been a great fit for my essay.
There’s a section that cites philosophy that also lends itself well to the more personal dynamics of the text. The book questions whether class consciousness can even be raised: “How can the relationship between the new ruling class and their art be sponsored when the ruling class wants to unwind after shift? Unwind, switch off its brain and its memory? By beauty? Still? All right. Two more Gray Monks, and a ragout fin, what about you, the same for me, OK, then two ragouts fins. Beauty as a Trojan horse? As a sugared pill? That’s not enough. And it’s a trick. The contents are not cut-and-dried, art is a process, not a product” (194). Hans seems to go against the grain of this raising of class consciousness. In the midst of critiquing the distracting effect of art on consciousness, we see them in a fine dining situation. There’s a repetition of the idea of a Trojan horse, which is an interesting motif that carries through the text—an illusory form that is empty (is that indeed their relationship? Katharina and Hans show the form of a relationship but the content is empty?).
The passage continues that “Beauty needs to be interwoven with truth. What you see at a glance and whatever lies beneath needs to be one and the same. As for that beauty, the poet said it is only the beginning of terror anyway. The contradictory nature of beauty. The searching that gives beauty its profundity. The joy of digging under the surface. The joy of questioning. The connection, therefore, between artist and working-class public is one that depends on the shared experience of work” (194). That passage proves integral to the book. Hans is obsessed with the truth of Katharina’s experience. He just has to keep digging because he can’t accept the difference between beauty and truth: “what you see at a glance and whatever lies beneath needs to be one and the same” and he cannot reconcile with the idea of a secret. It’s the obsessiveness of “digging under the surface”—continually probing for a perpetually receding truth. For more information on this, read my unpublished thesis project on paranoid epistemes. Linking back, Hans is obsessed with digging and so he can find no peace in the relationship; the joy of the relationship is the perpetual hunt. Following this line of thinking, Hans says, “art has nothing to do with a happy ending [...] and is only tolerable as hope.” He notes that “happy ending only present as hope” (194). And, if we’re thinking about how art has nothing to do with happy endings, if we suggest that unhappy endings are more artful, then Kairos is indeed a work of art.
The book hovers around questions of where to go next: in terms of their relationship, in terms of their history, and so on. Katharina considers “where shall she go, whose paths have been abolished? Certainly not back to her attic” (139). Instead, she goes to a cinema and imagines (remembers?) when Hans once said how “no one can match the Russians at editing and montage” (139). The connections between montage are often implied, a pathway left to be inferred. In many ways, Kairos reflects a similar approach, there are lots of small moments that provide insight into their relationship, a number of vignettes strewn together. After seeing the film, Katharina reflects on time: “Time steps out onto the street, and everything there is also over. Time feels so sticky, it’s as though it had lost all capacity for passing” (139). In another passage, Katharina considers how “time, which is invisible, becomes indirectly visible in terms of unhappiness. As though unhappiness were the costume of time. But at the same time, she thinks, this unhappiness isn’t just a wrapping, it has its own interior, a creature that, once it’s born, follows its own roads and has its own time. It’s strange, she thinks, that almost a year has passed, and she has been wholly unable to affect Hans’s disappointment” (219). There seems to be a conflict of time and, for Hans, time is ever-inaccessible: “the present only made sense for him when he could see it as a past-in-waiting that he could control. Now the present seems empty. He feels time pushing forward, but without his participation. Forward, in a manner of speaking. Him, and everyone else. Animals. Plants. Everything finite” (195). Yet, in the wake of the betrayal, “he has made memory, step by step, now his production is lamed. All quiet” (195). When he looks inward he is “staring blankly into the dark hole that is now his inner self” (195). He then immediately feels compelled to blame it on Katharina and show explain her to herself, essentially. The point is that their relationship changes their relationship to time and it seems consistent with the historical moment: things are moving forward, but are also based on a memory of an ideology, but are also frozen in time, separate from the rest of the world.
Taken together, Kairos is many things. The start of the book was immediately engaging. It’s tonally superb and the tension of the relationship is well-established for at least the first half of the book. The philosophical and historical layers to the text make it a worthwhile read, even if the second half of the book reads as somewhat repetitive and slow. In another way, Erpenbeck is after a magic trick that is largely effective. At one point, Erpenbeck notes how “Making the obvious unobvious is the trick of it” (49). It’s obvious that the relationship is doomed, obvious that the central characters are on a path of destruction, but it is making the obvious unobvious that is a trick. Similarly, Hans knows the truth and Katharina is obvious about it, but he strives to make the obvious unobvious for himself since the pleasure is in the searching. The obviousness of Hans’ unfaithfulness and hypocrisy is also disguised and glossed over so frequently. There’s a twist in the end of the book that is also obvious, but Erpenbeck makes it just unobvious enough for the premise to land.
Kairos was mostly good and it’s a complex and emotional novel. If you choose to read it, I hope you like it—but if things aren’t going well, remember you can always step away. The central characters of this book need to take that to heart, too.
Happy reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment