Today's Reading: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

This book tells the story of Katharina, a ninteen year old woman who begins an affair with Hans, a married man in his mid fifties in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in the late ninteen eighties -- the time of the decline and fall of the communist police state. This relationship is a toxic and cruel one and certainly could be seen as a metaphor for that no longer extant country. Both the relationship between Katharina and Hans and the relationship between the East German Stasi (state police) and the residents of the country is/was filled with distrust, asymmetry, and cruelty. If you want to read a happy story, stay away from this book. However, Erpenbeck is a remarkably subtle writer; those familiar with East German history, geography, and politics will be fascinated, at least in my opinion.

In addition, at least in my English translation, Erpenbeck has great prose style. Here is a section I noted:

Beauty as a Trojan horse? That's not enough. And it's a trick. The contents are not cut-and-dried, art is a process, not a product. 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. At shift's end? One word leads to another. Certainly, art has nothing to do with a happy ending ...

A word about the title. In Ancient Athens, KAIROS was one of two words for time, along with CHRONOS. The concept refers to the appropriate time, effort, or amount and was originally associated with weaving and archery. KAIROS was a central concept of rhetoric -- the art of persuasion -- for Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Rhetoric, at the time, was inseparable from philosophy, including poetics or the theory of art, ethics, and politics.