Kairos, Ivan And Phoebe, The Four Corners of the Heart

Meghan Collins Sullivan/NPR

It is easy to act as if fiction and history were separate. But they cannot be completely divided.

Besides the fact that literature comes with a rich history of its own, it can give readers access to the past that is not less valuable for being, to some degree, imaginary.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos and Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe offer this opportunity to connect with time past. Kairos takes readers into the final days of divided Germany, while Ivan and Phoebe, only a couple years and countries away, portrays the wobbly first moments of Ukraine’s post-Soviet independence. On the other hand, Françoise Sagan’s newly released The Four Corners of the Heart is a reflection of mid-20th-century French bourgeois society — but, primarily, an item of literary history: an incomplete and previously unknown work by a legendary writer. Both types of history count.

Kairos

Kairos, by the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, opens with a middle-aged woman named Katharina learning that her former lover, Hans, who was some 30 years older than her, has died. Very soon after, she comes home to discover that somebody has delivered two boxes of his writings to her home in Pittsburgh. Considering the boxes, she wonders, “Was it a fortunate moment… when she, just 19, first met Hans?” Kairos emerges from that question, traveling through memory to explore love and difference, the changing of historical seasons, and the crossing of borders both real and symbolic: Katharina and Hans’ romance starts in East Berlin in the final years of Germany’s division, in a moment when a starkly different future seems imminent. It would be too easy to take their relationship as an allegory for any sort of progress, and yet both the…