Karios by Jenny Erpenbeck

Karios by Jenny Erpenbeck

German Fiction

Original title- Karios

Translator Michael Hoffman

Source – Library

I’m back I had spent the last week in Scotland and had hoped to blog but time was against me so I return with a writer I have in the past struggled with in the past some writers I don’t connect with as much as others do and I feel this is the way with Erpenbeck. It isn’t the fact I don’t like her writing I just don’t get why so many others love it when it too me is just average any way this was in the lOcal Library sir I decided as it would be a Booker international book for next year I would read it. I want to see if this is a more personal story of a relationship that broke up being looked back on after the death pod one of the two lovers.

She has a suitcase of her own, full of letters, carbons, and souvenirs,”at product” for the most part, as the archivists like to say. Her own diaries and journals. The next day she climbs up the library steps and takes it down from the top shelf, it’s incredibly dusty inside and out. A long time ago, the papers in his boxes and those in her suitcase were speaking to each other. Now they’re both speaking to time. A suitcase like that, cardboard boxes like that, full of middles and endings and beginnings, buried under decades’ worth of dust; pages that were written to deceive alongside other pages that were striving for truth;

The past in a few boxes is picked apart

The book opens as Katherina remembers its she is asked to the funeral of Hans a much old writer she once had a relationship as she works through she has a suitcase and boxes from him as they form a casket of ghosts of this relationship as she works through those years and their relationship. They initially are perfect although he is maybe a father figure come lover for her at times he likes to show her what he knows and try and make her understand. The relationship is one of him trying to mould her and her much younger infatuation with the older man which is as we know never a good combination for relationships this has been the plot of many a book over the years. But as ever this is set in the downfall of EAST Germany from the early days when they are in a stable east to the tremors and then the downfall of the country and all the changes in the dynamics of the relationship add to that the discovery of Hans that his young lover had a one night stand this one moment serves as a turning point in their relationship as his view and treatment of Katherina changes and the story takes a darker turn all together

All fragments, fragments of endings, fragments of beginnings.Katharina leaves the two black bags, stuffed full of the life of the last six months, untouched, and a few days later takes them to her new apartment: back courtyard, old tenement building, studio room.Just a moment ago, she was working at the printshop, now her training is over, she is a qualified worker, she has successfully concluded her course in typography, and she’s writing her resignation letter:As per our spoken agreement and by mutual consent, I hereby request the termination of my contract with the Staatsverlag, Berlin, effective on July 7, 1987, the July 1 having been granted me for my move, and the days from July 2 TO 6 for my regulation Holiday. At this time, I love and do continue to love the regular freelance broadcaster and writer , Hans W

Later on and the relationship has changed

This is a wonderful insight into a relationship that is always doomed there is always an imbalance at the heart of the relationship add this to the backdrop of the wall falling and the effect that had on the two of them. I do wonder in this part of her life did Jenny have an old partner at some point it? A dark look at the heart of a relationship imploding and how someone you love can be so brutal is so well brought off here. It also shows the difference in the generations Hans is a perfect example of a man that grew up in the East and because of his job and he was happy in the East as in fact, that was all he knew. Kathrina wants to break free like many of her young peers did at the time. Well, I like her more after this book bit she seems to have opened up a bit in this book the voice of her as a writer felt stronger I do wonder if that is Hoffmann who has also brought her writing to life for me a bit more?  I think this will be a Booker international contender next year. If Gunter Von hagens wrote about relationships rather than doing autopsies this would be how he wrote.

Winstons score A -A doomed relationship in a doomed country is pulled apart after a death.