Erpenbeck, Jenny "Kairos"

Erpenbeck, Jenny "Kairos" (German: Kairos.) - 2021

This was the starter book for this month's Six Degrees of Separation. I haven't read the starter book very often but this was a new acclaimed book by an author I'd read and liked before, so I gave it a go.

I quite liked "The End of Days" (Aller Tage Abend) and hope this one would be just as good.

Jenny Erpenbeck was the first German author to receive the 2024 International Booker Prize.

This was an okay read but I was a little disappointed. The writing was not as fluent as expected. I think the love story should reflect the relationship between the two countries. And that was not a bad attempt. But, I didn't care for either of the protagonists, I couldn't feel sorry for them.

For those who don't know much about the former GDR or how the fall of the fall came about it probably isn't a bad book, though there are better ones that will tell you about this (The Tower/Der Turm, for instance)

All in all, I found the book, boring, tedious and tiresome. Yet another Booker prize award that I didn't like.

The title comes from an ancient Greek term for the right time.

From the back cover:

"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."

Kadaré, Ismail "The Pyramid"

Kadaré, Ismail "The Pyramid (Albanian: Piramida) - 1992

After Finnish author Mika Waltari's novel "The Egyptian", this is already the second novel I read about Ancient Egypt that really means something entirely different. Whilst "The Egyptian" was written straight after WWII, this one is about the totalitarian system in Albania.

"The Pyramid" tells us of the life under dicator Enver Hoxha and his crazy obsession for unnecessary and huge statues to show his power and strength. You can find a double meaning in almost every sentence, the ultimate motive of the pharaoh Cheops was to make his people so weak through building his gigantic pyramid so they have no power left to rebel.

The author is known as one of Europe's greatest writers, his voice against totalitarianism is second to none. He won the first Booker International Prize because he is "a universal writer in the tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer." His followers were such illustrious authors like Chinua Achebe, Alice Muro and Philip Roth. Who knows, he might receive the Nobel Prize for Literature one day.

Brilliant novel. You can tell the author has experienced this himself.

From the back cover:

"From the Albanian writer who has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize comes a hypnotic narrative of ancient Egypt, a work that is at once a historical novel and an exploration of the horror of untrammeled state power. It is 2600 BC. The Pharaoh Cheops is inclined to forgo the construction of a pyramid in his honor, but his court sages hasten to persuade him otherwise. The pyramid, they tell him, is not a tomb but a paradox: it keeps the Egyptian people content by oppressing them utterly. The pyramid is the pillar that holds power aloft. If it wavers, everything collapses.

And so the greatest pyramid ever begins to rise. It is a monument that crushes dozens of men with the placing of each of its tens of thousands of stones. It is the subject of real and imaginary conspiracies that necessitate ruthless purges and fantastic tortures. It is a monster that will consume all Egypt before it swallows the body of Cheops himself. As told by Ismail Kadare, 'The Pyramid' is a tour de force of Kafkaesque paranoia and Orwellian political prophecy."

After "The Fall of the Stone City", this is my second book by Ismail Kadaré but certainly not my last.

Ismail Kadaré received the Booker International Prize in 2005 for being "a universal writer in the tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer."

Achebe, Chinua "Things Fall Apart"

Achebe, Chinua "Things Fall Apart" (The African Trilogy #1) - 1958

A story about Nigeria just after the arrival of the first European colonists in the late nineteenth century.

I haven't read many African novels but this is by far the best one to portray African culture and what Europeans have done to them through their colonies. Okonkwo and his village live a perfectly good life with their tribes, tradition, religion, work and family life. And then the European missionaries arrive and tell them that everything they've done so far is wrong and force them into changes that none of them really wants.

What would we think if someone from another continent came and told us that our religion is wrong, the way we live is wrong, the way we work is wrong, that we are a failure altogether? They alienate our children, our partners, question our education system, the way we build our houses, organize our society.

We must not like Okonkwo in order to understand that colonialism was just wrong. This is no way to help another nation, another culture, it's just a way to destroy it and the lives of those that live it.

A great book that I would recommend to everyone who is interested in other cultures, even or especially if they don't exist like this anymore.

This is the first story of the author's "African Trilogy". "No longer at Ease" and "Arrow of God" are the follow-up novels.

From the back cover:

"Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a 'strong man' of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries.

These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul."

Chinua Achebe received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 2002.

Chinua Achebe received the Booker International Prize in 2007 because he "illuminated the path for writers around the world seeking new words and forms for new realities and societies".

Han, Kang "The Vegetarian"

Han, Kang "The Vegetarian" (Korean: 채식주의자/Ch'angbi) - 2007

When I found this book, I thought it might be about a woman who became a vegetarian. And it was. But also, it wasn't. This book has been described as dark and that is correct. But it is also weird. It is hard to follow the thoughts of the protagonists, I always try to empathize with any problem they encounter but I had a hard time doing it in this case.

This story is about two sisters and their husbands, about love and lust. There are three stories about Yeong-hye, the woman who turns vegetarian and whose life takes a strange turn and nobody's life will ever be the same again. The first story is told by her husband, the second by her brother-in-law, the third and last by her sister.

I would have loved to like this book. But I didn't, really.

From the back cover:

"A beautiful, unsettling novel about rebellion and taboo, violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul.

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself."

Kang Han received the Booker International Prize in 2016 for "The Vegetarian".

Kang Han received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024 "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life".

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Kadaré, Ismail "The Fall of the Stone City"

Kadaré, Ismail "The Fall of the Stone City" (aka Chronicle in Stone) (Albanian: Darka e Gabuar) - 1971

Since I would like to read a book of every country in the world (see Travel the World Through Books), I started looking for novels from countries I haven't read about, yet.

I hadn't come across a book from Albania, yet, but found this one by one of their renowned authors.

Even though the novel starts in 1943, it does go well into the fifties, to a time where not much about Albania was known to the outside world.

It was an interesting story. Being taken over after Nazi occupation from the Communists is like out of the frying pan into the fire, it certainly was no party for our protagonist who had to pay for trying to save his village during the war.

Anyway, not a large book, I would have loved to read more about this. I suppose I will have to read more by this author who writes in a very catching style.

From the back cover:

"It is 1943, and the Second World War is ravaging Europe. Mussolini decides to pull out of his alliance with the Nazis, and withdraws the Italian troops occupying Albania. Soon after, Nazi forces invade Albania from occupied Greece. The first settlement in their path is the ancient stone city of Gjirokastër, an Albanian stronghold since the fourteenth century. The townsfolk have no choice but to surrender to the Nazis, but are confused when they see that one of the town’s residents, a certain Dr. Gurameto, seems to be showing the invading Nazi Colonel great hospitality. That evening, strains of Schubert from the doctor’s gramophone waft out into the cobbled streets of the city, and the sounds of a dinner party are heard. The sudden disappearance of the Nazis the next morning leaves the town wondering if they might have dreamt the events of the previous night. But as Albania moves into a period of occupation by the Nazis, and then is taken over by the communists, Dr. Gurameto is forced to answer for what happened on the evening of the Nazi’s invasion, and finally explain the events of that long, strange night.

Dealing with themes of resistance in a dictatorship, and steeped in Albanian folklore and legend, The Fall of the Stone City shows Kadare at the height of his powers."

Ismail Kadaré received the Booker International Prize in 2005 for being "a universal writer in the tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer."

Munro, Alice "Runaway"

Munro, Alice "Runaway" - 2004

A brilliant collection of very interesting short stories that grip you from the first page. However, and it is a big however, I am not a big fan of short stories and this has shown me again why not. I love long novels, books that slowly move into the story, that give you enough background information so that you can get to know the characters and live with them for a while. Short stories just don't do that. I had to go back to the titles when I finished the book to see what they were about. I hadn't forgotten about Juliet but that was mainly because three stories focused on her ("Chance", "Soon" and "Silence")

But I couldn't remember Carla from "Runaway" as I hadn't really felt much about her, felt for her at all, I still have no idea why she had run away.  "Passion", again, I couldn't find a connection with the characters, not enough time to get to know them "Trespasses" was so weird, even during the story I didn't find a connection, almost like in "Runaway" and "Powers" seemed a haphazard short story of many short stories. Not my thing.

"Tricks" was probably my favourite, simply because it had a great twist at the end, because I could relate to the heroine, Robin, could truly feel the pain and longing with her. As to the rest, the same as with many short stories, they will forever remain acquaintances, never become friends.

I would love to read a novel by Alice Munro, one that has at least 500 pages. I'm sure it would be a great one! And I already said that about her novel "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" that all her stories would have enough background to write a large one.

Titles of the short stories:
Runaway
Chance
Soon
Silence
Passion
Trespasses
Tricks
Powers

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this dazzling new collection. Here are men and women of wildly different times and circumstances, their lives made vividly palpable by the nuance and empathy of Munro's writing. Runaway is about the power and betrayals of love, about lost children, lost chances. There is pain and desolation beneath the surface, like a needle in the heart, which makes these stories more powerful and compelling than anything she has written."

Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for being the "master of the contemporary short story".

Alice Munro received the Booker International Prize in 2009 for her lifetime body of work.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Roth, Philip "Zuckerman Unbound"

Roth, Philip "Zuckerman Unbound" - 1981

I had read the first Zuckerman story "The Ghost Writer" not that long ago and found the story fascinating. Partly autobiographical, partly alternate history, love and war, a perfect combination of all those topics and a very challenging but also entertaining read.

I therefore had to read how it goes on with our friend Zuckerman. I was a little disappointed. Not about the writing, not about the story as such, but that so much time had passed between the first and the second book. Not just many years but a lot of things happened during that time to the protagonist. The author fills us in on the major parts that happens but you still have the feeling that something is missing. As if you meet an old school friend after decades and don't really know who he is anymore.

Still, the story is as interesting and forthcoming as the first one. Nathan Zuckerman has more or less developed into the writer we expected him to become, his private life certainly leaves nothing wanting.

From the back cover: "The sensationalizing sixties are coming to an end, and even writing a novel can make you a star. The writer Nathan Zuckerman publishes his fourth book, an aggressive, abrasive, and comically erotic novel entitled Carnovsky, and all at once he is on the cover of Life, one of the decade's most notorious celebrities.

This is the same Nathan Zuckerman who in Philip Roth's much praised The Ghost Writer was the dedicated young apprentice drawing sustenance from the great books and the integrity of their authors. Now in his mid-thirties, Zuckerman, a would-be recluse despite his fame, ventures out on the streets of Manhattan, and not only is he assumed to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky ("Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?"), but he also finds himself the target of admirers, admonishers, advisers, and would-be literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lead an unsettled Nathan Zuckerman to wonder if "target" may be more than a figure of speech.

Yet, streetcorner recognition and media notoriety are the least disturbing consequences of writing Carnovsky. Against his best interests, the newly renowned novelist retreats from his oldest friends, breaks his marriage to a virtuous woman, and damages, perhaps irreparably, his affectionate connection to his younger brother and his family. Even when finally he lives out the fantasies of his fans and enjoys an exhilarating night with the beautiful and worldly film star Caesara O'Shea (a rather more capable celebrity), he is dismayed the following morning by the caliber of the competition up in the erotic big leagues.

In some of the novel's funniest episodes Zuckerman endures the blandishments of another New Jersey boy who has briefly achieved his own moment of stardom. He is the broken and resentful fan Alvin Pepler, in the fifties a national celebrity on the TV quiz show "Smart Money." Thrust back into obscurity when headlined scandals forced the quiz show off the air, Pepler now attaches himself to Zuckerman and won't let go--an "Angel of Manic Delights" to the amused novelist (who momentarily sees him as his "pop self"), and yet also the likely source of a demonic threat.

But the surprise that fate finally delivers is more devilish than any cooked up by Alvin Pepler, or even by Zuckerman's imagination. In the coronary-care unit of a Miami Hospital, Nathan's father bestows upon his older son not a blessing but what seems to be a curse. And, in an astonishingly bitter final turn, a confrontation with his brother opens the way for the novelist's deep and painful understanding of the deathblow that Carnovsky has dealt to his own past."

Philip Roth received the Booker International Prize in 2011.

Roth, Philip "The Ghost Writer"

Roth, Philip "The Ghost Writer" - 1979

Why I have not read any books by this extraordinary writer is a big mystery to me.

What can I say, I really loved the book. I wondered whether this book was partly autobiographical, it certainly had tendencies that sounded like it. I liked the alternate history part, a genre I cherish a lot.

A young writer meets an older writer, his writing hero. And there he meets an interesting young girl who seems to have a fascinating past. That is the basic story. However, it's the way Philip Roth tells the story that makes it interesting, makes you want to know all about Nathan Zuckerman, the young author, and his life, makes you want to read the whole series.

Within just 180 pages, Philip Roth manages to give an overview of Jewish history, the Holocaust, Anne Frank's diary, and life in the United States in the fifties, especially the situations of the Jews at the time.

If you like the first sentences: "It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago--I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman--when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man. The clapboard farmhouse was at the end of an unpaved road twelve hundred feet up in the Berkshires, yet the figure who emerged from the study to bestow a ceremonious greeting wore a gabardine suit, a knitted blue tie clipped to a white shirt by an unadorned silver clasp, and well-brushed ministerial black shoes that made me think of him stepping down from a shoeshine stand rather than from the high altar of art", you will like the whole book. His writing is beautiful.

I will definitely read more by this author, especially since I have ordered the second one in the series (Zuckerman Unbound) right away at my library already.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"Exactly twenty years ago, Philip Roth made his debut with Goodbye, Columbus, a book that immediately announced the presence of a major new talent. The Ghost Writer, his eleventh book, begins with a young writer's search, twenty years ago, for the spiritual father who will comprehend and validate his art, and whose support will justify his inevitable flight from a loving but conventionally constricting Jewish middle-class home.  Nathan Zuckerman's quest brings him to E.I. Lonoff, whose work--exquisite parables of desire restrained--Nathan much admires.  Recently discovered by the literary world after decades of obscurity, Lonoff continues to live as a semi-recluse in rural Massachusetts with his wife, Hope, scion of an old New England family, whom the young immigrant married thirty-five years before.  At the Lonoffs' Nathan also meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background.  He is instantly infatuated with the attractive and gifted girl, and at first takes her for the aging writer's daughter.  She turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's--and may also have been Lonoff's mistress.  Zuckerman, with his imaginative curiosity, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution.  If she were, it might change his life.

A figure of fun to the New York literati, a maddeningly single-minded isolate to his wife, teacher-father-savior to Amy, Lonoff embodies for an enchanted Nathan the ideal of artistic integrity and independence.  Hope sees Amy (as does Amy herself) as Lonoff's last chance to break out of his self-imposed constraints, and she bitterly offers to leave him to the younger woman, a chance that, like one of his own heroes, Lonoff resolutely continues to deny himself.  Nathan, although in a state of youthful exultation over his early successes, is still troubled by the conflict between two kinds of conscience: tribal and family loyalties, on the one hand, and the demands of fiction, as he sees them, on the other.  A startling imaginative leap to the beginnings of a kind of wisdom about the unreckoned consequences of art.

Shocking, comic, and sad by turns, The Ghost Writer is the work of a major novelist in full maturity."

I have read "Zuckerman Unbound" in the meantime.

Philip Roth received the Booker International Prize in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1980.

Alice Munro to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature 2013

Every year, I eagerly await the announcement of the Nobel Prize winner for Literature. This year, Alice Munro has been chosen as the first Canadian to receive this prodigious prize. I have no idea why this big country has not received the prize before because I have read quite a few great books by its authors.

Now I have to ask myself this question: Should I be proud that I know the new recipient and have read something by her or should I be sad that I didn't find a new great author this way as I usually do? I think I am a little of both.

Congratulations not just to Alice Munro but to all my Canadian friends, one of whom even suggested her when I asked the question "who would be your favourite Nobel Prize winner" on my facebook page a couple of days ago.

Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for being the "master of the contemporary short story".

I have read "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" and "Runaway" by her.

Alice Munro received the Booker International Prize in 2009 for her lifetime body of work.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Photograph by Derek Shapton.

Munro, Alice "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage"

Munro, Alice "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" - 2001

A collection of short stories. Not really my type of thing, I like long novels, I like to get to know the characters, be part of their lives, not just a visitor for an hour or so.

Alice Munro has a good writing style and I would have loved to read all nine of these stories as a book, wouldn't have minded reading 500+ pages on every single one of them. Alas, it was not to be, short stories she set out to write and short stories she wrote. Granted, good ones, and if you enjoy short stories, you should read these.

From the back cover:

"In these stories lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. The past, as Alice Munro's characters discover, is made up not only of what is remembered, but also what isn't. The past is there, just out of the picture, but if memories haven't been savoured, recalled in the mind and boxed away, it's as if they have never been - until a moment when the pieces of the jigsaw re-form suddenly, sometimes pleasurably but more often painfully. Women look back at their young selves, at first marriages made when they were naive and trusting, at husbands and their difficult, demanding little ways.

There is in this new collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in her characters for what might have been, for a fork in the road not taken, a memory suppressed in an act of prudent emotional housekeeping. But at the same time there is hope, there are second chances - here are people who reinvent themselves, seize life by the throat, who have moved on and can dare to conjure up the hidden memories, daring to go beyond what is remembered."

We discussed this in our international book club in April 2005.

I have also read "Runaway" in the meantime.

Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for being the "master of the contemporary short story".

Alice Munro received the Booker International Prize in 2009 for her lifetime body of work.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.