Welcome to Litsy!

This is a soft pick. It is incredibly well written, in parts it was over my head with cultural & historical references, sometimes fascinatingly so & sometimes it began to feel too much & meaningless. It did some truly interesting things with form in the second half of the book - with repetition & alternating pov between paragraphs - giving you real time variances between the two protagonists. But the relationship! I felt so disturbed ⬇️

A love affair that goes sour against the backdrop of the tumult of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The landscape of their relationship is mirrored in the political landscape of the time - tense, contentious, fragile, and fractured. Definitely a unique read and was wholly engaging. The writing style is engrossing.

This is basically a love story set against the end of a divided Germany. I think it was well written. But tbh it took me forever to get into this and it might be my only Erpenbeck for the time being.

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I found this book hauntingly real. It brought back so many memories of that febrile time in the 80s. When the East Germans came to the west en masse and then the wall fell. What‘s depicted here is the complicated and toxic relationship that came before and after reunification. Anna Funder writes about what was lost in Stasiland. The question to me is ‘we‘ve ended the Cold War, is life better now‘ I highly recommend this book.

Almost every sentence in this book seemed like it carried a double meaning that I didn't catch because I don't know enough about East German history/politics. And without that subtext it just becomes an increasingly weird romance between a student and a married man 39y older that goes: insta-love - unhealthy codependency - completely toxic and abusive. I enjoyed the glimpses into culture and daily life, but the main story just had me bewildered.

#CoverLove Day 15: #Orange paired with caramel banana crepe with vanilla ice cream. Luscious.

#CoverLove Day 14: Kairos by the light of a #Lamp along with dessert that consists of churros with banana and almonds and chocolate sauce dipped in affogato. Dessert while in Bandung, Indonesia last week.

A lot of people rave about this book, but I've also heard some things that make me hesitant. About to find out for myself.

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#CoverLove Day 6: #Yellow to somekinda-orange in Kairos - taken with a photo of my mocktail here in Bandung with some kind of lychee. 💕