For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to one of their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Desiree Santana—whose story “Primavera” appears in our Winter 2025 issue—examines a passage from Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck.
The last novel I bought and finished was Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. It follows a young girl named Katharina in East Berlin as she begins a relationship with an older married man named Hans in the late 1980s. Snow still lay in piles, blackening at their tips, as I encountered my favorite lines of the novel, set in the springtime.
The earth cracks open, and where there is landscape, crocuses push into the light. Where there is town, pansies are planted—they all look like Karl Marx.
These lines are almost comical in a novel that contains little humor elsewhere. (Erpenbeck is less than kind to her main character). And they stayed with me until I decided to remind myself of what pansies looked like. To my horror and delight, certain ones do look like Karl Marx. There is something about the darkness at the center of the petals and Marx’s beard greying at its ends that bears a strong resemblance. That is the gift literature gives us—the sharpest attention given to the smallest of things—and then that attention is shared and doled out into other minds, such as mine; and now I will never be able to look at pansies without thinking of communism.