Set against the backdrop of a world in flux, German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck tells a complicated love story fraught with questions of identity, memory, and the weight of history.
“One of Germany’s finest contemporary writers.” – Claire Messud, The New York Times
Set against the backdrop of a world in flux, German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck tells a complicated love story fraught with questions of identity, memory, and the weight of history.
Erpenbeck is a powerful historical excavator; her rendering of the ruins of a relationship, and its intertwining with cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and a whole world evaporates, confirms her as a major voice in European literature.
Charting the path of an intergenerational relationship caught in the shifting tide of the times, her newest novel explores themes of growing up and learning to love amidst the upheaval and existential bewilderment of a dramatically changing world.
In Kairos, both the teenage Katharina and the married fifty-something Hans must take stock of a social order quite literally falling down around them. Their time together is marked by the seismic geopolitical change happening on their doorstep, in which old certainties, old loyalties, can no longer be taken for granted.
Erpenbeck will be in conversation with writer and lecturer in modern drama at University College Dublin, Emilie Pine.
___
Jenny Erpenbeck is a German writer, theatre maker and opera director. Her work is translated into over thirty languages.
Presented in partnership with Goethe-Institut Irland.