Kairos -- Jenny Erpenbeck

I read Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Kairos with morbid fascination. It is a bleak, devastating story of an affair between a 19 year old woman and a married man 34 years her senior. It is obsessive and at times violent. However, the sparse, distant style of writing and the characters unique personalities drew me along. Set in East Germany in the years right before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the novel is also a view into the atmosphere and attitudes in East Germany at the time. I read a review that called this book "a wallow...cathartic leak of a novel, a beautiful bummer." I couldn't put it any better.