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At its core, Kairos its not much different from other novels of the same theme. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Dubin's Lives by Bernard Malamud, and The Other Woman by Therese Bohman all follow the same storyline: a torrid relationship between a young woman and an old man; and they are all better novels than Kairos.

Kairos gets bogged down in its attempt to be more of a work of art than a literary story. Erpenbeck includes lengthy stream-of-conscious passages and poetic wording throughout the novel. She creates an atmosphere around the depressed existence of her main characters, Katharina and Hans, who live in East Germany during the late 1980s.

The entire novel is a tedious effort due to its elaborate use of language. Adding to the boredom is an obsession with an event that happens halfway through the novel. Erpenbeck dwells on this event to the point of yawning unbelievability through most of the novel’s second half.

The main characters, Katharina and Hans, become secondary to the art that Erpenbeck tries to create. We never get to know them because they are almost exclusively represented by their nut-job relationship. In contrast, by the end of Lolita we all knew that Humbert Humbert was a nut-job, but we also felt some empathy for him because Nabokov let us inside Humbert’s heart and mind. With Kairos, all we get is the psycho-behavior at face value.

I can see why Kairos won the Booker Prize. The judges were likely hooked by a story that aspired to be more art than story. The reader, however, is left to suffer through its mountains of gloomy material that dwells on and on about things that are not very interesting, at least in the way that they are presented.