Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is one of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have read. On one level, it is a love story, or rather a story about the loss of love. It begins with a woman, Katharina, hearing about the death of her former lover. Boxes of his papers are delivered to her apartment, and when she sits down to open them the past rises before her like a pack of playing cards thrown into the air.
The book then moves back to their
