A sort ofCatherine was waiting for Hans on the threshold of the apartment. It was past midnight, but he had the key, only him, and because it was 1986, and there was no phone on hand, she was waiting to worry about her place in his life and in the world. He is sitting in the bar. He doesn’t want to go home, he wants to drink and forget, he wants to be alone tonight. Without it, the apartment is worthless, and he is lost in this world. She waited for a few hours, and then he went upstairs drunk. reconciliation. It seemed that I had forgotten everything the next day. Near the middle of the novel, when they sat together for two nights, the abyss appeared, initially a small crack.
Love needs romantic capital to survive. When we first met. We traveled together in the rain for the first time. Music that accompanies our desires. How do you lie on my lap reading a book, holding your head thinking. This kind of love is also very special because it is forbidden: a woman who has just grown up, a married writer in her fifties. From the moment they met on the bus, they made promises to each other. Because everything is so secret, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is a lot of anecdotal material that can be celebrated on paper and in East Berlin’s most distinctive restaurants, because Hans is a successful writer, not a dissident.
Seeds of doubt
“Kaylos”, that is the god of happy moments, can only be caught by a lock of hair. When they slept together for the first time, they would hear Mozart’s Requiem. “We can’t make ourselves unhappy,” Hans said. Death and love have been linked in an ancient tragic way. Although the ending has been hinted by Catherine and Hans and the readers, they don’t want to see it. They would rather be inside than outside. This is another theme novel. And read the scattered seeds of doubt like a lover: “It is complete and somehow clean. If she is different, he won’t want her like that, and he won’t be like that.”
What an old and familiar story. It is a difficult task to fill such a story with new metaphors and make it unpredictable and unique in the tragedy. Jenny Elpenbeck, born in East Berlin in 1967, has been called the “master of prose precision”, and her literary works have won numerous awards. We learned that visiting a museum is not necessarily about a museum at any time; it can start with the phrase “darkness snorts from the nostrils of the horse of death”, which reads like an adventure among the gods. Because of her precise handling of rhythm and speed and attention to detail, her work has been compared to orchestral music. Now it’s like this again. You almost hope that everything worth remembering over the years is recorded in the author’s language so that it can be presented to future generations with the same intensity.
Because the story takes place in East Berlin when the Berlin Wall fell, with the empty separation wall as its vision. Katharina studied typography at the National Press, and later she wanted to go to the art school. Hans’ father was a fanatical Nazi, Hans absorbed this ideology as a child, and later he went to East Germany voluntarily. He taught Katherine Hans Eisler’s music and played Ernst Busch’s songs to her long before she was born. Brecht’s theater explained that he remembered the last words of the tragic Lenin’s companion Bukharin. “If you die, why did you die?” The capital they love comes from a Bohemian in East Berlin. He follows his own dynamics. Thirty years later, his vocabulary and references are unfamiliar to many people. Yes, but it’s worth remembering. The social system around them, they hardly pay attention, as their happiness is passing by at the same speed and collapse, now people want to be able to look at them from the outside instead of looking so far inward.
It’s also a task to play the right note for everyone, for grandmothers and Nazi fathers (which have nothing to do with us), for a very young woman who was never naive, just longed for life, and bravely extended her vacation in the West, but there was only one When he was young, Hans described it as having nothing to do with politics, and being a member of the new era—often their voices were equal—which made him addicted to his addiction and constantly ignored the warnings of his friends. Because those people don’t understand what they are going through and how heavy the weight of love is. “What do you want such a person to do, there is no future.”
In the first summer, Catherine secretly visited Hans while the family was on vacation, and talked with him on the beach while his wife and son were bathing. By the second year, his opinion changed, and the excitement of successful surprise disappeared. And the clever Hans, has lived a life that makes some women unhappy, who knows that marriage nurtures his love, who wants to separate the feelings under the microscope-“It exists in the cursed truth of art. Century”-he always insisted in vain.
Jenny Elpenbeck herself comes from a family of East German writers. Hans has the characteristics of the writer Heiner Müller. He walks through her novels like a ghost. For example, when he saw a pianist in a bar, he reminded him that Katharina and the author are similar in some professional decisions. Interest and curiosity noticed this. How she manages to condense a moment in contemporary history in a relationship that is both depressing and fascinating is the real secret of this novel.
Jenny Elpenbeck: “Keros”. novel. Penguin Verlag, Munich 2021. 384 pages, hardcover, 22,-€
