Kairos

作者：Jenny Erpenbeck
原文出版年：2023

Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature.

Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos—an unforgettably compelling masterpiece—tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: “The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck’s work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies.” In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on his work as a translator: “Hofmann’s translation is invaluable—it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once ‘loyal’ and ‘beautiful.’”

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昨晚國際布克獎宣布得主，德國作家Jenny Erpenbeck的小說Kairos得獎了，譯者是Michael Hofmann。譯者與作者均分獎金£50,000。

上週德媒預測，她呼聲非常高，我就趕快去書店買書，讀了25頁，非常非常喜歡。這本小說透過所謂的「老少戀」（這詞真是有點危險），寫已經逝去的不存在的母國：前東德。果然得獎了。

我讀英文翻譯，prose真好，真好，真好。小說家的語言，真的太重要了。拒絕平庸，自負的精巧。總是要有點自負，堅信文學。小說寫柏林，那些街道與歷史切片，讀來很熟悉。

小說家寫政治，大家在街上寫政治。一直滑手機焦慮感炸，或許，要不要，考慮一下，來讀小說？