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Summary
Summary
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2021
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE 2021 READS
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A BEST BOOK OF 2021 FROM Washington Post, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic, Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly
" Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller.... Katie Kitamura is a wonder." --Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward and Eat the Document
"One of the best novels I've read in 2021." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times
A novel from the author of A Separation , an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.
An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.
She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she's asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.
A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kitamura's plodding latest (after A Separation) follows a group of jet-setting young professionals in The Hague, where a translator finds herself enmeshed in the private lives of her colleagues. There's something vaguely unseemly about the unnamed translator's married suitor, Adriaan, as well as other characters, including her boss in Language Services, the preppy curator she house-sits for, and a book dealer who is mugged during a recent wave of violence. But it's hard to discern what anybody is actually up to. Meanwhile, in the courts, the translator is entrusted with the cases of a recently extradited jihadist and a well-heeled former president of a West African country on trial for war crimes, with whom she must match wits. There are, unfortunately, plenty of unused opportunities for deeper character development; Adriaan in particular is built up as a nemesis, but he does little more than preen, while even less can be said of the various other dilettantes and sexual rivals. Subtle to a fault, this adds up to very little outside of a plethora of dinner scenes and undeveloped subplots, while the translator simply drifts through a Henry James--style chronicle of life abroad. Kitamura is a talented writer, but this one disappoints. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (July)
Guardian Review
"The appearance of simplicity is not the same thing as simplicity itself," thinks the narrator of Intimacies after discovering her Dutch boyfriend, Adriaan, is married. Similarly, while Katie Kitamura's writing is of the Orwell-approved "clear pane of glass" school, the cumulative effect of her deft, spare sentences is paradoxically confounding; what appears to be a straight path somehow becomes a labyrinth. Adriaan admits to having a wife. "But I don't know for how much longer," he tells the unnamed narrator. "Is that OK?" In fact, very little in this addictively mysterious novel is OK, from the "complex and contradictory" nature of The Hague, where the narrator has moved from New York, to her work as an interpreter at Kitamura's version of the international criminal court. Here, despite her skill and discipline, she finds "great chasms between words, between two or more languages, that could open up without warning". Cracks in her professional and private life widen as the book progresses. A mugging takes place outside her friend's apartment, and she becomes obsessed with the victim. Adriaan travels to Lisbon to divorce his estranged wife, but days become weeks and he stops texting. All the while she is living in his apartment, but realises she's left no impression of herself in its rooms, as if to show Adriaan "how easily I would slip into the fabric of his life, how little disturbance I would cause". In a moment of apprehension that further heightens the novel's almost uncanny atmosphere of threat, she judges herself "complicit in my own erasure". This echoes Kitamura's previous novel, A Separation. Its narrator, also unnamed, works as a literary translator, a job she values because of its "potential for passivity" (before that, in Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, Kitamura explored a disintegrating colonial state and mixed martial arts contests). But what lies at the root of her latest narrator's paralysis? True to her repressive tendencies, she never simply announces her reasons - she is as much outside herself as we are. She seems to have had a diplomatic brat's childhood, her family living in various European cities before settling in New York. She is grieving - her father died recently, after which her mother made a "sudden retreat" to Singapore - and she feels profoundly dislocated. "I want to be in a place that feels like home," she thinks after a Chinese woman addresses her in Mandarin, a language she cannot speak. But "where that was, I did not know". This biographical information arrives in scraps and asides because, somewhat like Faye, the effaced central character of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, the attentions of Kitamura's narrator are mostly directed outward. Several of the stories other characters tell her are extremely reminiscent of Cusk in their psychological acuity and moral dimension - as well as their fluency and uninterruptedness. The notable dissenter is a rare book dealer called Anton, whose acid rant about a rich couple's vulgar house is pure Thomas Bernhard. Anton is involved in two of the moments of intimacy that punctuate the novel, nearly all of which are ethically dubious or otherwise uncomfortable: the apparent collusion of two of the narrator's friends, who supposedly don't know one another; an ambiguous proposition at the end of a friendly dinner; words murmured in bed; sex in a restaurant toilet. But the most complex intimacies take place between the court's interpreters and the defendants. In one of the novel's stand-out scenes the narrator interprets at a private meeting between the court's most high-profile defendant, the former president of an unnamed African state, and the legal team he disdains: "These men who hectored him about the specificities of his actions, he wished to be free of them, in the same way that he wished to be free of his guilt." The former president thinks differently of the narrator. "The first time I saw you," he says, "I thought: I like this woman, because she is not truly from the West." But where is she from, and where should she be? She exemplifies the way in which we can function apparently normally - feed ourselves, perform our jobs, even maintain friendships - but at the same time be utterly adrift in our lives. When she interprets for the former president, a similar relationship between presence and absence is described: "You can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying." Her ability to interpret the events of her own life is fouled in a similar contradiction because of her inability to "draw a line from one thing to the next". Kitamura explores the political ramifications of this as well as the personal, describing how "none of us are able to really see the world we are living in" - that is, one in which the western world makes the rules, whether economic or judicial, and decides who must pay for breaking them and who gets a pass. This element of Kitamura's novel - perhaps what inspired Barack Obama to put it on his summer reading list - gives it a sweep at odds with its claustrophobic focus, and its specificity comes to feel universal, too. If it works for you as it did for me, the narrator's atomised experiences, her inability to forge a coherent narrative from her life, will feel compellingly strange as the pages rapidly turn - but also uncomfortably familiar, the book's final intimacy being the one between narrator and reader.
Kirkus Review
A watchful, reticent woman sees peril and tries not to vanish. "Every certainty can give way without notice," thinks the narrator of Kitamura's stunning novel, a statement both true and freighted. It's a delight to accompany the narrator's astute observational intelligence through these pages, as it was in A Separation (2017), which also unspooled completely in the mind of its speaker. Both slim books are pared down, without chapter headings or quotation marks. A murder unsettles A Separation; a mugging destabilizes this new book. Its narrator is a temporary translator at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where an unidentified head of state is on trial for atrocities in the months before the Brexit vote. The accused specifically requests the narrator to translate for him in a claustrophobic meeting with his defense team: "cross-border raid, mass grave, armed youth." She hears and doesn't hear the words amid her focus, just as she sees and doesn't completely register events in her everyday life. "It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed," she thinks, "the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know." This is the crux of Kitamura's preoccupation. She threads it brilliantly through the intimacies her character is trying to navigate: with new colleagues, women friends, and her beau, who goes away; with the work and with the nature of The Hague itself. Landscape holds a key, and on the final pages, the narrator intuits it might release her from some of the dread suffocating her. The novel packs a controlled but considerable wallop, all the more pleasurable for its nuance. This psychological tone poem is a barbed and splendid meditation on peril. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
New to The Hague, an unnamed interpreter works in the International Court, her job "to ensure that there would be no escape route between languages." Describing herself as "guarded," she has one close friend and dates Adriaan, who's in a protracted separation from his wife and children. The day before his departure, Adriaan informs the interpreter that he must visit his family in Lisbon and will be gone for a week, maybe more. As a week becomes a month and his communication with her wanes, she's assigned the high-profile case of a former president accused of election tampering and ethnic cleansing. The defense team for the accused, inured by now to descriptions of his crimes, in addition to requiring her interpretation skills, exploits her emotions as a barometer for the court's reaction to them. Like her protagonist, Kitamura (A Separation, 2017) is a master of precisely evocative language. In her work and in her isolation, the interpreter recognizes how familiarity can obscure intimacy, while its lack can yet lead to discomfiting proximity. The novel takes place so deeply within her that it's truly personlike, at once forthright and mysterious, a piercing and propulsive meditation on closeness of many sorts.
Library Journal Review
Kitamura's fourth novel, about a professional translator living in The Hague and dealing with personal and professional crises, makes for a tidy dyad with her previous book, A Separation. Both are deeply interior novels about women working their way through periods of displacement and reckoning with the fundamental mystery of ever truly knowing another person. Indeed, the titles of these two works could be fairly easily swapped, so similar are Kitamura's preoccupations. Like A Separation, this novel is haunted by specters of violence and doubt, tension built from its cerebral narrator's ruminations and observations. The action remains largely mundane by design, but Kitamura's way with character often inflects even that with a sheen of dread. Indeed, in many ways Kitamura emulates the tenor of any number of best-selling thrillers--peripheral characters are suspect, motivations are occluded, etc.--but her spare prose and refusal to ever offer summary conclusions keeps things all the more mysterious. Various narrative threads are woven, but they never web into any settled understanding; the author's tilt toward the existential peril of unknowing is fundamental to her sense of story. VERDICT Few things are more intimate (and terrifying) than the act of being in the world, and Kitamura's evocative interrogation of our ability to know ourselves and others is reinforced by the strength of her spare, haunting prose.--Luke Gorham, Galesburg P.L., IL