INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024
Berlin, July 1986. Katarina and Hans meet by chance on a bus. She is a nineteen-year-old student; he is a married writer around fifty-five. They are taken aback by the attraction that overwhelms them, something mutual and passionate, something that gradually intensifies through their shared interest in music and art, something that inevitably deepens and binds them even more precisely because this relationship must remain a secret.
Until she slips into a nocturnal transgression, he cannot forgive her, and a dangerous crack begins to form between them. Against the backdrop of the crumbling German Democratic Republic and the radical changes that followed, Jenny Erpenbeck, with her characteristic and penetrating language, talks about the abyss of happiness, about the journey of two lovers at the intersection of truth and falsehood, obsession and violence, hatred and hope.
Everything in their lives, at the very moment it happens, transforms into something that has already been lost. The dividing line is always just a single moment. The novel that rightly received the International Booker Prize 2024.
“With her brilliant style, Jenny Erpenbeck highlights the complexity of the relationship between a young woman and a man much older than her, observing the daily tensions and the disruptive turns that mark their intimacy [...]. Here, everything begins with enthusiasm and passion, but is also connected with power, art, and culture.
The self-centered absorption of the two lovers in what happens to them and then the fall into a shared destructive whirlpool are elements intertwined with the broader history of the German Democratic Republic during that period [...]. What transforms Time into an unusual and rare narrative is that it is a novel that makes you feel both good and uncomfortable at the same time, that it is a book personal and political in equal measure.
The author guides readers to make connections between events that defined entire generations and a disastrous, ruthless love affair, while simultaneously raising questions about the nature of fate and free will. Like the GDR, this particular relationship starts with optimism and trust, but along the way it fades and disintegrates.” From the reasoning of the jury for the International Booker Prize 2024
