The End and the Beginning
with Jenny Erpenbeck and David Bergen
Hosted by Peter Schneider
The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck's work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies.
\Our host, Peter Schneider, welcomes two of the world’s most gifted authors whose new novels bookend the cold war era.
Join us for a conversation on the tumult of history, the way we are shaped by forces beyond our control and the many ways love brings us together and pushes us apart.
We are thrilled to welcome Jenny Erpenbeck, one of the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature, to Canada in celebration of her latest novel, Kairos, translated into English by Michael Hofmann. It tells the story of a romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after.
David Bergen, the Scotiabank Giller Prize winning author of The Time In Between, returns to the Festival with Away from the Dead, set in early 20th-century Ukraine during the tumult of the Russian Revolution. As anarchists, Bolsheviks, and the White Army all come and go, each claiming freedom and justice, this remarkable novel embeds readers into the lives of characters connected through love, family, and loyalty.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
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