Booker Prize winner Jenny Erpenbeck chronicles the conflicting nature of truth

In Greek, the word “kairos” implies an awareness of a moment of crucial change. For writer Jenny Erpenbeck, it would be the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, when all the certainties she had held close to her through her life in East Germany turned into ephemera. She was 22 at the time, a university student in a family of writers. It would mould the kind of writing Erpenbeck would turn to herself — a time keeping of the modern European zeitgeist — her fiction gathering stories of all that gets lost in transition: Political systems, borders, ideologies, loves, lives and innocence. It is an arc that embraces Kairos, too, her fourth novel whose English translation by Michael Hoffman has won this year’s International Booker Prize. It makes Erpenbeck the first German writer to win the award, strengthening her position as one of contemporary Europe’s most influential writers and a possible Nobel Prize contender.

From the house by the lake in Brandenburg in her novel Visitation (2010), that becomes the unwitting witness to political calamities of 20th century Europe, to Go, Went, Gone (2015), where a professor attempts to help a group of migrants to remedy his own ignorance of their plight, to Kairos, where a love affair between a young woman and a married academic turns toxic in the backdrop of the fall of GDR, the political projects on to the personal in Erpenbeck’s work, its grand design whittled down to how it impacts individual lives. Like a miniaturist, she zooms in on the details to tease out the big picture of a changing European order.