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Intimacies
A novel from the author of A Separation, a taut and 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 explosive political fires: her work interpreting for a former president accused of war crimes becomes precarious as their relationship is unbound by shifting language and meaning.
This woman is the voice in the ear of many, but what command does that give her, and how vulnerable does that leave her? Her coolly impassioned views on power, love, and violence, are tested, both in her personal intimacies and in her role at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her; it is her drive towards truth, and love, that throws into stark relief what she wants from her life.
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 explosive political fires: her work interpreting for a former president accused of war crimes becomes precarious as their relationship is unbound by shifting language and meaning.
This woman is the voice in the ear of many, but what command does that give her, and how vulnerable does that leave her? Her coolly impassioned views on power, love, and violence, are tested, both in her personal intimacies and in her role at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her; it is her drive towards truth, and love, that throws into stark relief what she wants from her life.
225 pages, Hardcover
First published July 20, 2021
About the author
Katie Kitamura
14 books944 followersKatie Kitamura is the author of Gone to the Forest (2012) and The Longshot (2009), both finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. Gone to the Forest was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, and New Yorker online.
The recipient of a Lannan Foundation fellowship, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, BOMB, and is a regular contributor to Frieze.
Her third novel, A Separation, will be published in 2017.
The recipient of a Lannan Foundation fellowship, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, BOMB, and is a regular contributor to Frieze.
Her third novel, A Separation, will be published in 2017.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 3,894 reviews
August 10, 2023
I have many answers to the question "why do you read," which makes sense considering it's all I do to the detriment of my life, responsibilities, and personal relationships.
I read to escape. I read to travel. I read to learn. I read because I have no hobbies and a lot of free time. I read to compete with myself. I read because I like adding books to my reading tracker spreadsheet. I read because I am cursed with the knowledge of what a reading challenge is. I read so I can write reviews so I can have the serotonin burst that comes from getting likes on those reviews.
And sometimes, I read for realizations! This is one of those times.
Books are made up of language. They must submit to the failings and shortcomings of words, and yet we habitually forget this when we read, immersed as we are.
A book like this one, about an interpreter, helps to remind us of this, just as a book that takes place in the Hague, at its court, detailing the true evil that is found there, must remind us of the gray areas of morality that we find ourselves surrounded by every day, those which we too habitually forget.
Intimacies makes you question so much of what fades into the monotony of quotidian life: What is it to know someone? To find intimacy with them? To literally have it in proximity without having it in the poetic sense, and the inverse?
And what makes evil? What makes good? As we read about our interpreter, a woman of many countries who leaves America to arrive at a court that treats itself as the great decider of morality in spite of its decidedly Western outlook, how do we decide whether she is good? Or her coworkers, entangled in translations with life and death consequences? Her friends and lover, with their shifting allegiances? The work she does, the life she lives?
One of the best kind of books is that which makes you question everything - questions beginning within the pages and extending far beyond them.
Bottom line: I get why so many people I love loved this so much.
-----------------
pre-review
my favorite non-author writer said this was her favorite book of the year. so i have to like it, right?
...right?
update: finally, a win for my complete illogic.
review to come / 4.5 stars
I read to escape. I read to travel. I read to learn. I read because I have no hobbies and a lot of free time. I read to compete with myself. I read because I like adding books to my reading tracker spreadsheet. I read because I am cursed with the knowledge of what a reading challenge is. I read so I can write reviews so I can have the serotonin burst that comes from getting likes on those reviews.
And sometimes, I read for realizations! This is one of those times.
Books are made up of language. They must submit to the failings and shortcomings of words, and yet we habitually forget this when we read, immersed as we are.
A book like this one, about an interpreter, helps to remind us of this, just as a book that takes place in the Hague, at its court, detailing the true evil that is found there, must remind us of the gray areas of morality that we find ourselves surrounded by every day, those which we too habitually forget.
Intimacies makes you question so much of what fades into the monotony of quotidian life: What is it to know someone? To find intimacy with them? To literally have it in proximity without having it in the poetic sense, and the inverse?
And what makes evil? What makes good? As we read about our interpreter, a woman of many countries who leaves America to arrive at a court that treats itself as the great decider of morality in spite of its decidedly Western outlook, how do we decide whether she is good? Or her coworkers, entangled in translations with life and death consequences? Her friends and lover, with their shifting allegiances? The work she does, the life she lives?
One of the best kind of books is that which makes you question everything - questions beginning within the pages and extending far beyond them.
Bottom line: I get why so many people I love loved this so much.
-----------------
pre-review
my favorite non-author writer said this was her favorite book of the year. so i have to like it, right?
...right?
update: finally, a win for my complete illogic.
review to come / 4.5 stars
May 31, 2021
Not sure what to think of this book. It is one of those stories that is very language and character driven. This is all about interiority set against acts of translation, the men who commit war crimes, a complicated relationship, a woman without a home. Quite fascinating, really with a beautiful ending.
September 1, 2022
Gorgeous, gorgeous prose. Read this on a single train ride which was a feat because I wanted to slow down and savor every paragraph. I love the way Kitamura writes about language, closeness, and the impossibility (necessity?) of understanding the other.
April 9, 2023
5 "derealized, implosive, exceptional" stars !!!
7th Favorite Read of 2022
For the last two days my heart has been in my throat. I slept so poorly and I was filled with such existential angst. This short novel shook me to my inner core and I intuit that this novel will continue to flutter and flutter and flutter.....
Ms. Kitamura has written a small masterpiece of the life of a young Japanese woman who is anchorless, receptive and interior. The heroine is both astute and naive and she is flailing for roots, for a home and for a place where she is safe from misogyny, racism, from microaggressions. She is swayed by power, by virility, by mens' indifferences and cruelties. She leans into and is also repelled by her own eroticized and exoticized self vis-a-vis the Western male gaze. Friendships with women are fleeting, cursory and competitive. On the greater scale there are atrocities such as genocides and wars while closer to home there are assaults, infidelities, griefs. The heroine flits and floats through this morass through her work as an interpreter and as a new citizen of the Hague.
This book is not about beautiful prose, complex plot or development of character. The novel transcends all of that and gives us glimpses into the anarchy and emptiness of our contemporary world. The careless cruelties that we inflict on each other, the intersectionality of gender, race, economic privilege. This book is also about longing, survival, the deepest of loneliness and despite all of this the deeper meanings of what it is to be human.
Ms. Kitamura has her fingertip right on the existential pulse and I continue to tremble...
7th Favorite Read of 2022
For the last two days my heart has been in my throat. I slept so poorly and I was filled with such existential angst. This short novel shook me to my inner core and I intuit that this novel will continue to flutter and flutter and flutter.....
Ms. Kitamura has written a small masterpiece of the life of a young Japanese woman who is anchorless, receptive and interior. The heroine is both astute and naive and she is flailing for roots, for a home and for a place where she is safe from misogyny, racism, from microaggressions. She is swayed by power, by virility, by mens' indifferences and cruelties. She leans into and is also repelled by her own eroticized and exoticized self vis-a-vis the Western male gaze. Friendships with women are fleeting, cursory and competitive. On the greater scale there are atrocities such as genocides and wars while closer to home there are assaults, infidelities, griefs. The heroine flits and floats through this morass through her work as an interpreter and as a new citizen of the Hague.
This book is not about beautiful prose, complex plot or development of character. The novel transcends all of that and gives us glimpses into the anarchy and emptiness of our contemporary world. The careless cruelties that we inflict on each other, the intersectionality of gender, race, economic privilege. This book is also about longing, survival, the deepest of loneliness and despite all of this the deeper meanings of what it is to be human.
Ms. Kitamura has her fingertip right on the existential pulse and I continue to tremble...
May 5, 2023
‘We interpreters were only extras passing behind the central cast and yet moved with caution, we had a sense of being under observation.’
The full feel of Intimacies by the wonderful Katie Kitamura reminds me of a coffee company I once worked for that, instead of doing one thing well, did a dozen things that resulted in mediocrity. When this novel hits it really connects and there is so much good going for something that stumbles out and is, unfortunately, less than the sum of its parts while still being quite an engaging read. This is the story of a woman at the international courts in The Hague as an interpreter that reminds us that our job is only one facet of our lives and her life out of work becomes a complex tangle of romantic intrigue and violent mystery, all of which vie for emotional assessment in an economically driven world that demands priority in your employment over—and often at the expense of—all else. The heart of this novel is an examination on language in a narrative that takes a critical look into the ways our perceptions of people, places and ideas are based on fragile contexts that can change at any moment. Intimacies subverts the standard courtroom drama as it addresses a lot of interesting issues, from the imperialist implications in the focus of international court trials, examinations of manipulation and its linguistic weaponry, or how we all assess the world through lenses of context, and while it never quite meshes properly it is a fascinating read nonetheless.
In The Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain, Jorge Luis Borges tells of a fictional detective novel where a final throwaway statement recontextualizes the entire scenario and a reread will reveal the police apprehended the wrong person. This sort of contextual dissonance and shaky perceptions are the pulse of Intimacies, a novel where each new detail shifts the frame of reference. At least for the characters, who are continuously feeling their reality shift. There is the narrator’s friend Jana, who is living in an area everyone seems to constantly want to refer to as a bad part of town. In an increasingly gentrified city, it can be assumed that these characters mean a place of lower income and everyone isn’t white, which works quite effectively as a racial class commentary on their elitist aspects and—to the benefit of the novel and prevailing theme—allowing the reader to receive the message contextually instead of head on. After a supposed violent mugging at her apartment complex she notes about the numerous CCTV cameras outside ‘I always hated the cameras, I thought it was the sign of a surveillance state. But now I find they make me feel a little bit safer.’ She concludes by saying half in jest that ‘I suppose this is how people become conservative,’ to pull the observation of context into an applied example of how political positions market themselves to capture primal emotions such as fear and safety.
The narrator’s journey through Intimacies is also a series of recontextualizations leaving her increasingly bewildered in her new home. Seeking any life that will anchor her in The Hague after moving from New York, her relationship with still-married Adriaan (a man who it must be assumed is abnormally attractive and charismatic otherwise his flat and relatively bland character seems incompatible with his story and the romantic plot, though maybe that’s part of the point?) becomes an unstable landscape as she is told more details about his estranged wife and his supposed negotiations with her. With all men in the book, each detail means she was ‘aware of his presence in a new way,’ and each shift twists the story towards new horizons.
At the same time she seeks to be a new impression of herself in this city, meeting new people and finding new relations. ‘[T]he prospect offered by a new relationship,’ she muses, ‘the opportunity to be someone other than yourself.’ There is a mystery to her past as we learn very little about her other than she left NYC, her father has passed and her mother lives in Singapore, and the knowledge that we are only knowing her through the context she gives makes the mystery all the more enticing. It works better than the mugging mystery plot that arrives midway through the novel and which, unfortunately, sidelines much of the story. Literal mysteries have a narrative charm and that plotline is fun, but I feel they just don’t have the same bite and gravity that existential ones do. Each side plot does well by being another angle from which to view the themes, but they all feel only half-explored and overly direct.
Which becomes an issue with the book itself, though I’m rooting for Kitamura the whole way. She is good and all the right parts are there, but it’s like too many similar spices on one meal that muddy the flavor instead of enhance it. Jana is a successful character but dissipates as the novel progresses, making way for siblings Eline and her possibly-assaulted brother Anton who seem to represent high class but also snobbery, especially the latter. While their stories are good, and the narrator’s intrusion into a secondary story about chance encounters and the nature of violence feel akin to Javier Marías without the digressions, they feel under explored and the take-away quotes feel a bit less-than-profound and deflated without enough tension. The book honestly feels caught between too short and too long, where 100pgs left could have made for a crisp novella had the scenes all been condensed with atmospheric high tension while on the other hand an additional 100pgs could have let each story breathe more and better dig into their purposes. ‘A narrative becomes persuasive not through complexity but conviction,’ the narrator says at one point, and this book seems trapped between which of these two it wants to be.
Where it does succeed, and handedly so, is the Hague narrative and it’s examinations of language. As an interpreter, she is tasked with making ‘the space between languages as small as possible.’ There is fascinating discussion on how tone and word choice can subtly shift the context of court testimonies that might affect emotional resonance and other opinions of those on trial. An alteration in tone, cadence or other linguistic mannerisms can alter the perception of what is said and of the person who said it, recontextualizing the message in a way that may distort it to the judge and jury, and when translating for a war criminal the narrator states that ‘he became the perspective I occupied.’ To this effect, the narrator doesn't occupy much space in her own narrative in the novel at large, instead precieving everything around her and interpreting it to us, the reader.
Because of this need to as-close-as-possible linguistic reenactment through translation, anything that has a gap between idea and impression feels off to her. There is a particularly powerful scene about a painting that seems to express conflicting impressions that functions as a metaphor for this theme:
This also show up with the court and how it’s ‘modern architecture still seemed incongruous’ to the ideas of the institution in an old Dutch city, and she comments on a colleague it’s ‘not the person but the context that made his presence so incomprehensible.’ Kitamura explores how these incongruencies are perfect opportunities to exploit situations, particularly by self assured men who ‘capitalized on disorientation’ This manipulation is key to winning a trial, or winning someones good favor, or, in a larger scale, depicting the court as a branch of white supremacist colonialism to distract from the multiple counts of war crimes and genocide as faced by a former African-nation president charged with trying to overturn an election. Everyone tries to be objective, even in ways the narrator finds questionable, and it’s hard to know what is real and what is an illusion made by manipulating different contexts to form a narrative, such as she thinks of the court journalists who ‘had merely fragments of the narrative and yet they would assemble those fragments into a story like any other story, a story with the appearance of unity.’
This book is a lot of fun and really shows a well-rounded portrait of court personnel as people with lives outside of their job. The many narratives are all interesting, yet seem to be vying for attention and never fully functional in the process. Kitamura is a sharp writer with direct prose that flows perfectly from exposition to investigation, so much so that the gems of insight seem like only scratching the surface of what you know she can offer. Despite some gripes that are, really, fairly minor, this is a smart book that succeeds in its themes and remains more atmospheric and psychological than mere plot driven, which I definitely appreciate. Longlisted for the National Book Award, Intimacies still makes me eager to read what Kitamura will do next.
3/5
The full feel of Intimacies by the wonderful Katie Kitamura reminds me of a coffee company I once worked for that, instead of doing one thing well, did a dozen things that resulted in mediocrity. When this novel hits it really connects and there is so much good going for something that stumbles out and is, unfortunately, less than the sum of its parts while still being quite an engaging read. This is the story of a woman at the international courts in The Hague as an interpreter that reminds us that our job is only one facet of our lives and her life out of work becomes a complex tangle of romantic intrigue and violent mystery, all of which vie for emotional assessment in an economically driven world that demands priority in your employment over—and often at the expense of—all else. The heart of this novel is an examination on language in a narrative that takes a critical look into the ways our perceptions of people, places and ideas are based on fragile contexts that can change at any moment. Intimacies subverts the standard courtroom drama as it addresses a lot of interesting issues, from the imperialist implications in the focus of international court trials, examinations of manipulation and its linguistic weaponry, or how we all assess the world through lenses of context, and while it never quite meshes properly it is a fascinating read nonetheless.
In The Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain, Jorge Luis Borges tells of a fictional detective novel where a final throwaway statement recontextualizes the entire scenario and a reread will reveal the police apprehended the wrong person. This sort of contextual dissonance and shaky perceptions are the pulse of Intimacies, a novel where each new detail shifts the frame of reference. At least for the characters, who are continuously feeling their reality shift. There is the narrator’s friend Jana, who is living in an area everyone seems to constantly want to refer to as a bad part of town. In an increasingly gentrified city, it can be assumed that these characters mean a place of lower income and everyone isn’t white, which works quite effectively as a racial class commentary on their elitist aspects and—to the benefit of the novel and prevailing theme—allowing the reader to receive the message contextually instead of head on. After a supposed violent mugging at her apartment complex she notes about the numerous CCTV cameras outside ‘I always hated the cameras, I thought it was the sign of a surveillance state. But now I find they make me feel a little bit safer.’ She concludes by saying half in jest that ‘I suppose this is how people become conservative,’ to pull the observation of context into an applied example of how political positions market themselves to capture primal emotions such as fear and safety.
The narrator’s journey through Intimacies is also a series of recontextualizations leaving her increasingly bewildered in her new home. Seeking any life that will anchor her in The Hague after moving from New York, her relationship with still-married Adriaan (a man who it must be assumed is abnormally attractive and charismatic otherwise his flat and relatively bland character seems incompatible with his story and the romantic plot, though maybe that’s part of the point?) becomes an unstable landscape as she is told more details about his estranged wife and his supposed negotiations with her. With all men in the book, each detail means she was ‘aware of his presence in a new way,’ and each shift twists the story towards new horizons.
At the same time she seeks to be a new impression of herself in this city, meeting new people and finding new relations. ‘[T]he prospect offered by a new relationship,’ she muses, ‘the opportunity to be someone other than yourself.’ There is a mystery to her past as we learn very little about her other than she left NYC, her father has passed and her mother lives in Singapore, and the knowledge that we are only knowing her through the context she gives makes the mystery all the more enticing. It works better than the mugging mystery plot that arrives midway through the novel and which, unfortunately, sidelines much of the story. Literal mysteries have a narrative charm and that plotline is fun, but I feel they just don’t have the same bite and gravity that existential ones do. Each side plot does well by being another angle from which to view the themes, but they all feel only half-explored and overly direct.
Which becomes an issue with the book itself, though I’m rooting for Kitamura the whole way. She is good and all the right parts are there, but it’s like too many similar spices on one meal that muddy the flavor instead of enhance it. Jana is a successful character but dissipates as the novel progresses, making way for siblings Eline and her possibly-assaulted brother Anton who seem to represent high class but also snobbery, especially the latter. While their stories are good, and the narrator’s intrusion into a secondary story about chance encounters and the nature of violence feel akin to Javier Marías without the digressions, they feel under explored and the take-away quotes feel a bit less-than-profound and deflated without enough tension. The book honestly feels caught between too short and too long, where 100pgs left could have made for a crisp novella had the scenes all been condensed with atmospheric high tension while on the other hand an additional 100pgs could have let each story breathe more and better dig into their purposes. ‘A narrative becomes persuasive not through complexity but conviction,’ the narrator says at one point, and this book seems trapped between which of these two it wants to be.
Where it does succeed, and handedly so, is the Hague narrative and it’s examinations of language. As an interpreter, she is tasked with making ‘the space between languages as small as possible.’ There is fascinating discussion on how tone and word choice can subtly shift the context of court testimonies that might affect emotional resonance and other opinions of those on trial. An alteration in tone, cadence or other linguistic mannerisms can alter the perception of what is said and of the person who said it, recontextualizing the message in a way that may distort it to the judge and jury, and when translating for a war criminal the narrator states that ‘he became the perspective I occupied.’ To this effect, the narrator doesn't occupy much space in her own narrative in the novel at large, instead precieving everything around her and interpreting it to us, the reader.
Because of this need to as-close-as-possible linguistic reenactment through translation, anything that has a gap between idea and impression feels off to her. There is a particularly powerful scene about a painting that seems to express conflicting impressions that functions as a metaphor for this theme:
‘the ambiguity of the image itself...not a painting of temptation, but rather one of harassment and intimidation….The painting operated around a schism….the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardor and seduction, and the woman, who have been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation.’
This also show up with the court and how it’s ‘modern architecture still seemed incongruous’ to the ideas of the institution in an old Dutch city, and she comments on a colleague it’s ‘not the person but the context that made his presence so incomprehensible.’ Kitamura explores how these incongruencies are perfect opportunities to exploit situations, particularly by self assured men who ‘capitalized on disorientation’ This manipulation is key to winning a trial, or winning someones good favor, or, in a larger scale, depicting the court as a branch of white supremacist colonialism to distract from the multiple counts of war crimes and genocide as faced by a former African-nation president charged with trying to overturn an election. Everyone tries to be objective, even in ways the narrator finds questionable, and it’s hard to know what is real and what is an illusion made by manipulating different contexts to form a narrative, such as she thinks of the court journalists who ‘had merely fragments of the narrative and yet they would assemble those fragments into a story like any other story, a story with the appearance of unity.’
This book is a lot of fun and really shows a well-rounded portrait of court personnel as people with lives outside of their job. The many narratives are all interesting, yet seem to be vying for attention and never fully functional in the process. Kitamura is a sharp writer with direct prose that flows perfectly from exposition to investigation, so much so that the gems of insight seem like only scratching the surface of what you know she can offer. Despite some gripes that are, really, fairly minor, this is a smart book that succeeds in its themes and remains more atmospheric and psychological than mere plot driven, which I definitely appreciate. Longlisted for the National Book Award, Intimacies still makes me eager to read what Kitamura will do next.
3/5
January 4, 2022
Jan 22 update: wrote about this for the Rumpus! https://therumpus.net/2022/01/intimac...
Oh gosh I loved this - one of my faves in a while: A complex trial in The Hague, musings on interpretation and art (with a fabulous exhibition), and a memorable lead, with a great love dynamic. “That was, I thought, the prospect offered by a new relationship, the opportunity to be someone other than yourself”
Oh gosh I loved this - one of my faves in a while: A complex trial in The Hague, musings on interpretation and art (with a fabulous exhibition), and a memorable lead, with a great love dynamic. “That was, I thought, the prospect offered by a new relationship, the opportunity to be someone other than yourself”
August 15, 2021
Having read “A Separation”, by Katie Kitamura….a slim novel that I found quite compelling—I did the ‘happy-dance’ when a ‘Little Library’ in my neighborhood had this bright pink thin hardcopy - looking as new as in any bookstore I’ve ever seen…. “Intimacies”….was mine to take home and read.
I enjoyed my quiet time reading this book. The only noise in my house was Phil & Lil….(our parakeets were making little sounds in the background).
I was drawn in from the first page.
“It is never easy to move to a new country, but in truth I was happy to be away from New York. That city had become disorienting to me, after my father‘s death and my mother’s sudden retreat to Singapore. For the first time, I understood how much my parents had anchored me to this place none of us were from. It was my father‘s long illness that kept me there, and with its unhappy resolution I was suddenly free to go. I applied for a position of staff interpreter at the Court on impulse, but once I had accepted the job and moved to The Hague, I realized that I had no intention of returning to New York, I no longer knew how to be at home there”.
Instantly—I felt the unnamed narrator’s voice….the outsider she was ….the outsider she herself felt.
The intimacy we feel is through our protagonist > with people she meets both professionally and personally.
She becomes involved with a man whose wife left him—living in his apartment. At some point the man leaves to go visit his wife and children. The wife at this point is living with another man herself —in Lisbon.
‘SHE’…. continues staying in his apartment while he was gone.
We meet SHE’s friend, Jana. A crime had occurred—a man was assaulted near where Jana lived.
SHE becomes disbursed in the assault…entering dangerous territory.
Although we sense the danger concealing itself —this is more a character driven story rather than a plot driven one.
This is a quiet, introspective, book…..as compelling as ‘A Separation’ was.
Displacement, love, acceptance, self-identity are some of the themes….
But for me …what stands out is the purity-and-intimacy of ‘thyself’ and of strangers met along the the path-of-living.
“She spoke as if homeownership had transformed her completely, as if she had been buried in the battlements of her apartment, her life ossified. But I knew this wasn’t true, that Jana‘s own situation remained contingent, the stability around us was simply a matter of appearances. That must have been, I realized what Adriaan had felt when he had returned home to find an empty apartment. I gazed at him across the table, that must have been what he felt when he gathered the children and set them down, as he search for the words to tell them that their mother was gone. Every certainty can give way without notice. No one and nothing was exempt from this rule, not even Adriaan”.
“For a long time, Jana was quiet. Her face was creased with fatigue and worry and I had a vision of her restless in the night, peering out the window, getting out of bed to check door was locked. There was no ghost of coquetry of her manner now, nothing that was in the least bit performed, she seemed to have turned completely inward”.
Katie Kitamura is one of those memorable authors who makes me grateful for the beauty and power of language….with her unerring eye for detail and a rich experience.
I enjoyed my quiet time reading this book. The only noise in my house was Phil & Lil….(our parakeets were making little sounds in the background).
I was drawn in from the first page.
“It is never easy to move to a new country, but in truth I was happy to be away from New York. That city had become disorienting to me, after my father‘s death and my mother’s sudden retreat to Singapore. For the first time, I understood how much my parents had anchored me to this place none of us were from. It was my father‘s long illness that kept me there, and with its unhappy resolution I was suddenly free to go. I applied for a position of staff interpreter at the Court on impulse, but once I had accepted the job and moved to The Hague, I realized that I had no intention of returning to New York, I no longer knew how to be at home there”.
Instantly—I felt the unnamed narrator’s voice….the outsider she was ….the outsider she herself felt.
The intimacy we feel is through our protagonist > with people she meets both professionally and personally.
She becomes involved with a man whose wife left him—living in his apartment. At some point the man leaves to go visit his wife and children. The wife at this point is living with another man herself —in Lisbon.
‘SHE’…. continues staying in his apartment while he was gone.
We meet SHE’s friend, Jana. A crime had occurred—a man was assaulted near where Jana lived.
SHE becomes disbursed in the assault…entering dangerous territory.
Although we sense the danger concealing itself —this is more a character driven story rather than a plot driven one.
This is a quiet, introspective, book…..as compelling as ‘A Separation’ was.
Displacement, love, acceptance, self-identity are some of the themes….
But for me …what stands out is the purity-and-intimacy of ‘thyself’ and of strangers met along the the path-of-living.
“She spoke as if homeownership had transformed her completely, as if she had been buried in the battlements of her apartment, her life ossified. But I knew this wasn’t true, that Jana‘s own situation remained contingent, the stability around us was simply a matter of appearances. That must have been, I realized what Adriaan had felt when he had returned home to find an empty apartment. I gazed at him across the table, that must have been what he felt when he gathered the children and set them down, as he search for the words to tell them that their mother was gone. Every certainty can give way without notice. No one and nothing was exempt from this rule, not even Adriaan”.
“For a long time, Jana was quiet. Her face was creased with fatigue and worry and I had a vision of her restless in the night, peering out the window, getting out of bed to check door was locked. There was no ghost of coquetry of her manner now, nothing that was in the least bit performed, she seemed to have turned completely inward”.
Katie Kitamura is one of those memorable authors who makes me grateful for the beauty and power of language….with her unerring eye for detail and a rich experience.
December 23, 2022
Now longlisted for the 2021 US National Book Awards and the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award.
One of Obama’s 2021 Summer picks – and given its subject matter that implies a real authenticity to the novel which in my view is more than matched by the power of its writing.
The author has said that this book was initially inspired by listening to Charles Taylor (ex president of Liberia) defend himself against war crimes at The Hague. Later she visited the International Criminal Court there to observe the trial of Laurent Gbabgo (ex-president of the Ivory Coast): while there realising she had visited the sand-dunes near the Court as a child (an idea she uses in the novel).
The unnamed narrator is an interpreter at the International Criminal Court – of Japanese-American descent (like the author) she has taken - rather on impulse - a 1 year maternity cover position there – moving from New York after her father’s death and her mother’s move to Singapore.
She starts a tentative relationship with a newly separate man Adriaan – who invites her to move into his flat while he visits his estranged wife (who is in Lisbon with their children) to ask for a divorce. A friend of Adriaan’s wife – Kees – seems to go out of his way to cast doubts on her relationship with Adriaan, doubts not helped by a steady diminution in communication from Portugal. Her closest friend is Jana – a Serbian/Ethiopian descended curator at the National Gallery – who owns an apartment in an edgier part of town. A husband of a friend of Jana (an antiquarian bookerseller) is violently mugged near Jana’s apartment. The narrator becomes preoccupied with her friend’s brother, who was badly assaulted in a street crime in rather unexplained circumstances – which take a rather different tone when she later sees the man in a restaurant. She attends an exhibition that Jana has curated (which gives rise to some of the strongest moments of the book)
And while all this is going on – the court gains a high profile new case (one I think very explicitly modelled on Gbabgo) and the narrator finds herself first of all asked to interpret when he is first bought to the Hague (actually based on a misunderstanding as to his choice of language) and then requested by the defence team – which turns out to be lead at a critical juncture by Kees - to aid their work.
All of this – combined with events leading up to the book - leads to the narrator having a sense of uncertainty, destabalisation and of untethering – which very much lies at the heart of the book.
Themes that the book explores include:
The impact of evil and violence.
The apparent cognitive dissonance between being pre-occupied with the cares and stresses of daily life while surrounded by wider and seemingly more weightier and terrible global matters as well as an associated sense of disorientation from a cascade of information: a dissonance and disorientation in the narrator’s life which also reflects 21st Century living against a backdrop of climate change and political turmoil.
The pliability of language – and the way in which it can be manipulated to both defend and justify
The challenges of interpretation (the author’s previous book was appropriately about a translator) - many of which ideas I think also stand for the difficulties of communication and understanding in relationships and even the difficulties of fiction writing
The Westernism and apparent anti-African bias of the International Court – this is remarked on explicitly by both accused and acknowledged by court employees, but the most powerful moment is an unacknowledged one at Jana’s exhibition as they stand “around a bust of Johan Maurits, who founded the museum with a fortune built from the transatlantic slave trade”
A brilliant discussion of Judith Leyster’s “The Proposition” (“Man offering money to a young woman”) with a feminist interpretation
And this painting I think is crucial to the book as it’s a motif that reappears through the book – with the narrator subject to the predatory and manipulative attentions of both Kees and (less explicitly) the bookseller and then more crucially the former President for who she is no more than an instrument to be used.
A discussion of painting versus photography which again stands also for the idea of knowing someone in a relationship and for capturing them in fiction
If there is a small false note in the novel – it’s when Jana’s friend Eline worries about the Brexit vote and that it is likely to go for Leave, which in turn “did not bode well for the upcoming elections in the United States” – probably making her the only liberal in the West who expected both the Brexit and Trump votes as something of an inevitability.
The author is married to Hari Kunzru and the two are the first readers of each other’s work, and the two seem to be to explore similar ideas in their work (around communication). I am reminded a little in that respect of Catherine Lacey and Jesse Ball. However unlike Lacey and Ball whose work has a not dissimilar style and even some intertextuality – it is hard to think of a greater contrast between the quietly crafted and restrained exploration here and Kunzru’s compilation (although often not total coalescence) of disparate ideas.
Overall I found this an impressive book whose quiet power grew on me during its reading.
My thanks to Penguin Random House, Jonathan Cape for an ARC via NetGalley
One of Obama’s 2021 Summer picks – and given its subject matter that implies a real authenticity to the novel which in my view is more than matched by the power of its writing.
The author has said that this book was initially inspired by listening to Charles Taylor (ex president of Liberia) defend himself against war crimes at The Hague. Later she visited the International Criminal Court there to observe the trial of Laurent Gbabgo (ex-president of the Ivory Coast): while there realising she had visited the sand-dunes near the Court as a child (an idea she uses in the novel).
The unnamed narrator is an interpreter at the International Criminal Court – of Japanese-American descent (like the author) she has taken - rather on impulse - a 1 year maternity cover position there – moving from New York after her father’s death and her mother’s move to Singapore.
She starts a tentative relationship with a newly separate man Adriaan – who invites her to move into his flat while he visits his estranged wife (who is in Lisbon with their children) to ask for a divorce. A friend of Adriaan’s wife – Kees – seems to go out of his way to cast doubts on her relationship with Adriaan, doubts not helped by a steady diminution in communication from Portugal. Her closest friend is Jana – a Serbian/Ethiopian descended curator at the National Gallery – who owns an apartment in an edgier part of town. A husband of a friend of Jana (an antiquarian bookerseller) is violently mugged near Jana’s apartment. The narrator becomes preoccupied with her friend’s brother, who was badly assaulted in a street crime in rather unexplained circumstances – which take a rather different tone when she later sees the man in a restaurant. She attends an exhibition that Jana has curated (which gives rise to some of the strongest moments of the book)
And while all this is going on – the court gains a high profile new case (one I think very explicitly modelled on Gbabgo) and the narrator finds herself first of all asked to interpret when he is first bought to the Hague (actually based on a misunderstanding as to his choice of language) and then requested by the defence team – which turns out to be lead at a critical juncture by Kees - to aid their work.
All of this – combined with events leading up to the book - leads to the narrator having a sense of uncertainty, destabalisation and of untethering – which very much lies at the heart of the book.
Themes that the book explores include:
The impact of evil and violence.
The apparent cognitive dissonance between being pre-occupied with the cares and stresses of daily life while surrounded by wider and seemingly more weightier and terrible global matters as well as an associated sense of disorientation from a cascade of information: a dissonance and disorientation in the narrator’s life which also reflects 21st Century living against a backdrop of climate change and political turmoil.
The pliability of language – and the way in which it can be manipulated to both defend and justify
The challenges of interpretation (the author’s previous book was appropriately about a translator) - many of which ideas I think also stand for the difficulties of communication and understanding in relationships and even the difficulties of fiction writing
there were great chasms beneath words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning. As interpreters it was our job to throw down planks across these gaps.
This was not aided by the fact that interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, 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. Language loses its meaning.
As I looked down at the witness, it prickled through me, the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious.
The Westernism and apparent anti-African bias of the International Court – this is remarked on explicitly by both accused and acknowledged by court employees, but the most powerful moment is an unacknowledged one at Jana’s exhibition as they stand “around a bust of Johan Maurits, who founded the museum with a fortune built from the transatlantic slave trade”
A brilliant discussion of Judith Leyster’s “The Proposition” (“Man offering money to a young woman”) with a feminist interpretation
I turned back to the canvas, and it occurred to me then that only a woman could have made this image. This was not a painting of temptation, but rather one of harassment and intimidation, a scene that could be taking place right now in nearly anyplace in the world. The painting operated around a schism, it represented two irreconcilable subjective positions: the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardor and seduction, and the woman, who had been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation. That schism, I now realized, was the true inconsistency animating the canvas, and the true object of Leyster’s gaze.
And this painting I think is crucial to the book as it’s a motif that reappears through the book – with the narrator subject to the predatory and manipulative attentions of both Kees and (less explicitly) the bookseller and then more crucially the former President for who she is no more than an instrument to be used.
A discussion of painting versus photography which again stands also for the idea of knowing someone in a relationship and for capturing them in fiction
The idea was almost impossibly personal, and I realized the notion of such a sustained human gaze was outside the realm of experience today. For that reason, the paintings opened up a dimension that you did not normally see in photographs, in these paintings you could feel the weight of time passing. I thought that was why, as I stood before a painting of a young girl in half-light, there was something that was both guarded and vulnerable in her gaze. It was not the contradiction of a single instant, but rather it was as if the painter had caught her in two separate states of emotion, two different moods, and managed to contain them within the single image. There would have been a multitude of such instants captured in the canvas, between the time she first sat down before the painter and the time she rose, neck and upper body stiff, from the final sitting. That layering—in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity—was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography. I wondered if that was the reason why contemporary painting seemed to me so much flatter, to lack the mysterious depth of these works, because so many painters now worked from photographs.
If there is a small false note in the novel – it’s when Jana’s friend Eline worries about the Brexit vote and that it is likely to go for Leave, which in turn “did not bode well for the upcoming elections in the United States” – probably making her the only liberal in the West who expected both the Brexit and Trump votes as something of an inevitability.
The author is married to Hari Kunzru and the two are the first readers of each other’s work, and the two seem to be to explore similar ideas in their work (around communication). I am reminded a little in that respect of Catherine Lacey and Jesse Ball. However unlike Lacey and Ball whose work has a not dissimilar style and even some intertextuality – it is hard to think of a greater contrast between the quietly crafted and restrained exploration here and Kunzru’s compilation (although often not total coalescence) of disparate ideas.
Overall I found this an impressive book whose quiet power grew on me during its reading.
My thanks to Penguin Random House, Jonathan Cape for an ARC via NetGalley
May 22, 2022
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On paper, Intimacies is my kind of read. In actuality, well, turns out it is anything but. While it ticks all the ‘in’ boxes (an unnamed narrator, ambiguous storyline, no quotation marks), the ‘story’ and characters were dusty, dull, done-to-death. Our narrator is an interpreter who lives and works in The Hague and works for the International Court where her latest assignment sees her interpreting for a former president, much beloved by his people, who stands accused of many atrocious war crimes. She’s in a lukewarm relationship with Adriaan, a man who can be best described as being as interesting as Wonder Bread. The guy’s wife left him but they are still married and that’s about it. Our protagonist thinks about this woman in a wannabe-Rebecca kind of way.
Our narrator has a friend Jana whose characterisation is risible. Nothing she said rang true (to me of course, feel free to disagree and nay at this review), nor did it succeed in being absurd, if that even was what it was going for. Jana mentions to our mc that she saw someone being attacked in her neighbourhood and for some reason, our mc goes on to find this man’s workplace and goes there because of reasons unknown.
Nothing seems to happen. We have stilted interactions between the same two or three characters, some uninspired comments about violence, the judicial system, language, and the tricky nature of interpretation. I was particularly disappointed by the language aspect of this narrative. I am bilingual (and i am taken for a foreigner in both of the languages i speak...go figure) and my mother has been a translator for...well, all my life. So, naturally, I am interested in languages and translation, and I am keen on reading books that explore these fields. Intimacies regurgitates the same tired ideas on these topics, and even the interpretation angle felt poorly explored. There are only three or four passages on language/interpreting that struck me as perceptive, but these happen fairly on in the narrative...
The scenes taking place at the Court were odd, particularly for the way they were executed.
There is no plot as such. The mc wastes some time navel-gazing, thinking not so deep thoughts. She has a few repetitive and inauthentic encounters and exchanges with the same group of not so believable characters ….and that’s it. The whole relationship between her and this married man was bah. Who cares? Not me! I am tired of reading this same type of heterosexual sort-of-love-triangle. Jana seemed forgotten by the narrative and sidelined to make space for that man who was attacked. This guy goes on to deliver a stilted monologue that sounded so insincere.
In short, Intimacies was a vexing read. I recommend you check out more positive reviews before you decide whether to read this or not (on the plus size, it’s a short read). I read the author's other book (A Separation) and found it much more effective in establishing an ambience of ambiguity.
ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
On paper, Intimacies is my kind of read. In actuality, well, turns out it is anything but. While it ticks all the ‘in’ boxes (an unnamed narrator, ambiguous storyline, no quotation marks), the ‘story’ and characters were dusty, dull, done-to-death. Our narrator is an interpreter who lives and works in The Hague and works for the International Court where her latest assignment sees her interpreting for a former president, much beloved by his people, who stands accused of many atrocious war crimes. She’s in a lukewarm relationship with Adriaan, a man who can be best described as being as interesting as Wonder Bread. The guy’s wife left him but they are still married and that’s about it. Our protagonist thinks about this woman in a wannabe-Rebecca kind of way.
Our narrator has a friend Jana whose characterisation is risible. Nothing she said rang true (to me of course, feel free to disagree and nay at this review), nor did it succeed in being absurd, if that even was what it was going for. Jana mentions to our mc that she saw someone being attacked in her neighbourhood and for some reason, our mc goes on to find this man’s workplace and goes there because of reasons unknown.
Nothing seems to happen. We have stilted interactions between the same two or three characters, some uninspired comments about violence, the judicial system, language, and the tricky nature of interpretation. I was particularly disappointed by the language aspect of this narrative. I am bilingual (and i am taken for a foreigner in both of the languages i speak...go figure) and my mother has been a translator for...well, all my life. So, naturally, I am interested in languages and translation, and I am keen on reading books that explore these fields. Intimacies regurgitates the same tired ideas on these topics, and even the interpretation angle felt poorly explored. There are only three or four passages on language/interpreting that struck me as perceptive, but these happen fairly on in the narrative...
The scenes taking place at the Court were odd, particularly for the way they were executed.
There is no plot as such. The mc wastes some time navel-gazing, thinking not so deep thoughts. She has a few repetitive and inauthentic encounters and exchanges with the same group of not so believable characters ….and that’s it. The whole relationship between her and this married man was bah. Who cares? Not me! I am tired of reading this same type of heterosexual sort-of-love-triangle. Jana seemed forgotten by the narrative and sidelined to make space for that man who was attacked. This guy goes on to deliver a stilted monologue that sounded so insincere.
In short, Intimacies was a vexing read. I recommend you check out more positive reviews before you decide whether to read this or not (on the plus size, it’s a short read). I read the author's other book (A Separation) and found it much more effective in establishing an ambience of ambiguity.
ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
October 1, 2021
What happens when words lose context? They just become sounds, utterances, as meaningful as a line in a dictionary.
That's what happens to our narrator, a woman who works as an interpreter in the International Court at The Hague. While interpreting for a case that brings a war criminal into her daily life, words are translated, the meaning slipping away in an immediate, dissociative numbness.
What happens when people lose their context? For example, if the colonial label was removed from a group of people, would they look any different from another group? I think we know the answer to that, one that upends cultural identity.
And, what about when an individual loses context? They are rootless, homeless in a sense. Our narrator, who moved countries countless times as a child, has no place where she feels at home. Even in her complicated romantic relationship, she lives in her lover's home for a time, like a visitor, with another woman's photo on the wall.
This is a strangely compelling book, and I suppose I've tried to tie the story together a bit to give it... oh, yeah, some context... because it's hard to know what to make of it. Without context, everything is at a distance. An emotional remove that leaves one unattached, and without deeper understanding. If you don't find the context here, you may find yourself removed, shuffling aimlessly through these pages.
It's true, Intimacies doesn't have much of a plot - it is searching and wandering, yet oddly engaging. It's quiet, it's artsy, it's filled with tension. For those of us who have waited for the phone to ring, or said words that don't land, their impact abandoned to the wind, this book will hold a gentle appeal. One that feels like home.
Judith Leyster's "The Proposition", 1631. (I love books that introduce new-to-me works of art. Thank you, Katie Kitamura.)
That's what happens to our narrator, a woman who works as an interpreter in the International Court at The Hague. While interpreting for a case that brings a war criminal into her daily life, words are translated, the meaning slipping away in an immediate, dissociative numbness.
What happens when people lose their context? For example, if the colonial label was removed from a group of people, would they look any different from another group? I think we know the answer to that, one that upends cultural identity.
And, what about when an individual loses context? They are rootless, homeless in a sense. Our narrator, who moved countries countless times as a child, has no place where she feels at home. Even in her complicated romantic relationship, she lives in her lover's home for a time, like a visitor, with another woman's photo on the wall.
This is a strangely compelling book, and I suppose I've tried to tie the story together a bit to give it... oh, yeah, some context... because it's hard to know what to make of it. Without context, everything is at a distance. An emotional remove that leaves one unattached, and without deeper understanding. If you don't find the context here, you may find yourself removed, shuffling aimlessly through these pages.
It's true, Intimacies doesn't have much of a plot - it is searching and wandering, yet oddly engaging. It's quiet, it's artsy, it's filled with tension. For those of us who have waited for the phone to ring, or said words that don't land, their impact abandoned to the wind, this book will hold a gentle appeal. One that feels like home.
Judith Leyster's "The Proposition", 1631. (I love books that introduce new-to-me works of art. Thank you, Katie Kitamura.)
September 1, 2023
a narrative becomes persuasive not through complexity but convictionThis book was listed in Barack's best of list. Roxane Gay praised it as well. Or at least, she gave it 4 stars. These are people whose book lists and recommendations I vibe with so you can imagine my surprise when I found myself rather ambivalent about it.
The story starts with our nameless protagonist. She is working as an interpreter for The Hague. She has recently moved the from New York and suddenly, she needed a change of pace following a tragedy,
I had lived with my slow-moving grief for so long that I had ceased to notice itAs she navigates life in the Hague, she makes observations. Some astute. Some eye-opening. Some thought-provoking. For instance, there could be a lot of socio-cultural commentary on privilege,
The three men were almost certainly immigrants, possibly Turkish and Surinamese. Meanwhile, their labor was necessitated by the heritage aesthetic of the city, not to mention the carelessness of a wealthy population that dropped its cigarette butts onto the pavement without a thought, when the designated receptacle was only a few feet away, I now saw that there were dozens of cigarette butts on the ground directly below the ashtrays. It was only an anecdote. But it was one example of how the city’s veneer of civility was constantly giving way, in places it was barely there at all.Our protagonist makes such marked notes of the city she now finds herself residing in.
And she's an interloper. A wealthy drifter with no roots and no people. She has a kinda sorta boyfriend Adriaan. A kinda sorta bff Jana. Both feel like drifting apparitions who haunt the periphery of our protagonists's life.
She made observations about relationships as well. As someone who just got out of a 10 year quasi-marriage, I was struck by the chords she hit which I didn't even know were playing.
Even from the inside...what do you really know of your own marriage? One day you realize you are living with a stranger.When it became known that I was single, certain suitors made their admirations known. And I responded without the marked hostility or anxiety that previously plagued me. I was surprised by my own openness and entertaining the possibility of dating just for fun. Something which is alien to me. Primarily because I am a chronic loner and am about as approachable as a porcupine. But this recent liberty from the shackles of a relationship have my edges softer. My quills blurred. That's not say it's open season, I don't care for unwelcome attention. But I digress, the change in me wasn't even something I had bothered to articulate but again Captain Observer to the rescue,
the prospect offered by a new relationship, the opportunity to be someone other than yourself.Remember our narrator works at the International Criminal Court. And when we start getting into the nitty gritty of her work does the story lose me. Not because of the subject matter, but because this story decided to pussyfoot.
At its core this book wanted to be an intimate look into certain ways of life. But perhaps the author just couldn't be arsed to dive a little deeper. The book is so insistent on leaving our narrator pressed firmly against the display, seemingly against her own will. The best parts of the book happen outside her purview and the book can't even be arsed to give us a breakdown of these events secondhand.
Some things also felt heavily artificial. And I couldn't help but compare it to other Observer Literature™️. See, ordinarily, or at least, what I have grown accustomed to is an Observer™️ who, while only participating in the fringes, eventually joins the story and a change happens. Character driven stories need to have character arcs. From the start of the story to the end, there has to be a satisfying change, regressive or progressive or stagnation borne of complacency or failure. Give me something goddammit. This book promised me a five course meal but I got a pixelated GIF of aperitifs. I am disappointed. But I loved the language and the first half of the book. I would have preferred to dive in more. Just have more... I would have preferred something a little more—intimate.
3.5 stars.
November 20, 2021
The Quantum State of Language
The distinction between an image and an ikon, I think, lies at the heart of this novel. An image traps the gaze in its uniqueness, or unexpectedness, or beauty, or even its horror. But an ikon is meant to generate and entirely different sort of experience, one that goes beyond the object being looked at. As such, an ikon exists in two states simultaneously, both as a presence and as the mark of an absence, that is, of a transcendent reality. Or to put it more simply: appearance and meaning.
And so, it seems to me, language as well as art exists in a similar quantum state of uncertainty. It is ‘there’ as a statement, a question, or a command. And yet it is also transcendent in its power to suggest a reality far beyond whatever is being said or written. While language itself may be objective, therefore, the reality created by language is entirely subjective; that is, its reception depends upon all the prior experiences of the hearer or reader.
Kitamura makes the distinction between image and ikon clear in several ways - in her protagonist’s appreciation of 17th century painting, in her assessment of casual relationships, and even in those relationships that are not so casual. Most significantly, the distinction is obviously crucial to her work as a translator in the International Court of Justice. She recognises that her job is one of ikon not image. She,of course, must provide precise and consistent translations for court proceedings; but she also feels obliged to provide subtle indications of pace, emotion, and cultural background into the way she translates.
This doesn’t mean the translations she provides are ‘better’ except in the sense that they are more iconic. They point to something else beyond the words themselves, perhaps to the reality of the suffering being described or to the real person behind the courtroom mask of the accused and witnesses. Interestingly, while she is engaged in this task, this being a living ikon, she herself has no understanding of the totality of what she is saying. It’s as if she enters a sort of trance during which she is continuously making linguistic judgments and what exists for her are only these word by word, phrase by phrase judgments. She has no memory of the representations, the images if you like, of what she has translated.
Kitamura also seems to signal her intention by dissolving the distinction between direct and indirect speech. Dialogue emerges from rapportage without warning and without quotation marks. First person mixes with third person grammar. Who is speaking becomes slightly confusing. This conforms with the experience of her protagonist: “As I looked down at the witness, it prickled through me, the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious.” It also conforms with the state of language itself, something that is really indeterminate, not because it is vague but because it is simultaneously true and false.
The distinction between an image and an ikon, I think, lies at the heart of this novel. An image traps the gaze in its uniqueness, or unexpectedness, or beauty, or even its horror. But an ikon is meant to generate and entirely different sort of experience, one that goes beyond the object being looked at. As such, an ikon exists in two states simultaneously, both as a presence and as the mark of an absence, that is, of a transcendent reality. Or to put it more simply: appearance and meaning.
And so, it seems to me, language as well as art exists in a similar quantum state of uncertainty. It is ‘there’ as a statement, a question, or a command. And yet it is also transcendent in its power to suggest a reality far beyond whatever is being said or written. While language itself may be objective, therefore, the reality created by language is entirely subjective; that is, its reception depends upon all the prior experiences of the hearer or reader.
Kitamura makes the distinction between image and ikon clear in several ways - in her protagonist’s appreciation of 17th century painting, in her assessment of casual relationships, and even in those relationships that are not so casual. Most significantly, the distinction is obviously crucial to her work as a translator in the International Court of Justice. She recognises that her job is one of ikon not image. She,of course, must provide precise and consistent translations for court proceedings; but she also feels obliged to provide subtle indications of pace, emotion, and cultural background into the way she translates.
This doesn’t mean the translations she provides are ‘better’ except in the sense that they are more iconic. They point to something else beyond the words themselves, perhaps to the reality of the suffering being described or to the real person behind the courtroom mask of the accused and witnesses. Interestingly, while she is engaged in this task, this being a living ikon, she herself has no understanding of the totality of what she is saying. It’s as if she enters a sort of trance during which she is continuously making linguistic judgments and what exists for her are only these word by word, phrase by phrase judgments. She has no memory of the representations, the images if you like, of what she has translated.
Kitamura also seems to signal her intention by dissolving the distinction between direct and indirect speech. Dialogue emerges from rapportage without warning and without quotation marks. First person mixes with third person grammar. Who is speaking becomes slightly confusing. This conforms with the experience of her protagonist: “As I looked down at the witness, it prickled through me, the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious.” It also conforms with the state of language itself, something that is really indeterminate, not because it is vague but because it is simultaneously true and false.
February 25, 2022
Difficile descrivere libri così intimi pur essendo così impalpabili.
"Tra le nostre parole" è un invito all'ascolto. L'ascolto dei mondi interiori che ognuno di noi abita. La storia è quella di un'interprete di origine giapponese che si trasferisce nei Paesi Bassi per fare da traduttrice alla Corte Internazionale di Giustizia di Den Haag (L'Aia), compito difficilissimo data la natura politica dei crimini (genocidi, attentati, crimini di guerra, corruzione su larga scala). La protagonista è la mediatrice in un territorio apparentemente neutrale (il tribunale internazionale) tra imputati e giustizia.
I confini sono sfumati, niente sembra davvero giusto e sbagliato, le storie che ci vengono riportate sono solo apparentemente semplici da giudicare ma questo romanzo decide volutamente di viaggiare su onde sonore a bassa intensità. Sarebbe stato facile fare un thriller o un mistery dozzinale con questa cornice narrativa (leader politici carismatici e la loro guerra contro il Diritto Internazionale). Ma non ci sono colpi di scena in questa storia fatta di osservazioni, sensazioni, riflessioni sulle lingue, sulle incomprensioni e su quanto "nessuno di noi è davvero in grado di vedere in che mondo viviamo". Viviamo in questa ovatta di privilegio, il privilegio di dimenticare tante immagini dell'orrore presente nelle nostre vite.
Kitamura ci restituisce un quadro vivido dell'esperienza contemporanea con le sue giustapposizioni, con il suo oscillare tra l'ordinario e l'estremo, tra la ristrettezza delle nostre case in affitto e all'opposto la massima disponibilità a viaggiare in capo al mondo con voli low cost, tra la possibilità di conoscere tutto quello che succede globalmente e l'ignoranza massima su cosa succede nelle vite di chi ci sta vicino.
Un romanzo impossibile da classificare, pieno di crepe da cui entra un po' di luce, come direbbe Yates. Un libro di quieta rivolta contro l'indifferenza e i sentimenti banali.
"Tra le nostre parole" è un invito all'ascolto. L'ascolto dei mondi interiori che ognuno di noi abita. La storia è quella di un'interprete di origine giapponese che si trasferisce nei Paesi Bassi per fare da traduttrice alla Corte Internazionale di Giustizia di Den Haag (L'Aia), compito difficilissimo data la natura politica dei crimini (genocidi, attentati, crimini di guerra, corruzione su larga scala). La protagonista è la mediatrice in un territorio apparentemente neutrale (il tribunale internazionale) tra imputati e giustizia.
I confini sono sfumati, niente sembra davvero giusto e sbagliato, le storie che ci vengono riportate sono solo apparentemente semplici da giudicare ma questo romanzo decide volutamente di viaggiare su onde sonore a bassa intensità. Sarebbe stato facile fare un thriller o un mistery dozzinale con questa cornice narrativa (leader politici carismatici e la loro guerra contro il Diritto Internazionale). Ma non ci sono colpi di scena in questa storia fatta di osservazioni, sensazioni, riflessioni sulle lingue, sulle incomprensioni e su quanto "nessuno di noi è davvero in grado di vedere in che mondo viviamo". Viviamo in questa ovatta di privilegio, il privilegio di dimenticare tante immagini dell'orrore presente nelle nostre vite.
Kitamura ci restituisce un quadro vivido dell'esperienza contemporanea con le sue giustapposizioni, con il suo oscillare tra l'ordinario e l'estremo, tra la ristrettezza delle nostre case in affitto e all'opposto la massima disponibilità a viaggiare in capo al mondo con voli low cost, tra la possibilità di conoscere tutto quello che succede globalmente e l'ignoranza massima su cosa succede nelle vite di chi ci sta vicino.
Un romanzo impossibile da classificare, pieno di crepe da cui entra un po' di luce, come direbbe Yates. Un libro di quieta rivolta contro l'indifferenza e i sentimenti banali.
October 6, 2021
It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, 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.
Food for thoughts to come.
Food for thoughts to come.
August 10, 2021
“Intimacies” by Katie Kitamura is an atmospheric story that truly does not have plot line (or at least I don’t see it). It’s a story narrated by an unnamed narrator who takes up a job as an interpreter/translator at the Hague. And our narrator makes it clear that there is a difference between being a translator versus an interpreter. A translator converts one language into another. An interpreter needs to apply intentions and nuances, especially cultural nuances.
The narrator left New York city after her father died and her mother left for Singapore. She doesn’t tell the reader, but through her narration we feel that she still has unprocessed grief and some feelings of abandonment. In her quest to get away from her personal issues, she finds herself involved with a married man which adds complications to her already stressful job. She must interpret for war criminals, and one, a former African president, who chooses her for his translator. This man is accused of horrible atrocities involving ethnic cleansing. Her works weighs heavily on her. She must interpret all heinous crimes the president is accountable for ordering.
Back to her married boyfriend. He decides to go to Lisbon to breakup with his wife. He’ll be gone a week at most. He wants her to stay in his apartment while he’s gone. This is strange because their relationship is new, and also it felt wrong….like witnessing a slasher movie when the actors keep doing stupid things that lead to their eventual death. The reader knows this is NOT a good idea. To add to this, he ghosts her and is gone for over a month. So not only is she quietly suffering through her emotionally charged job, she goes home to an empty apartment wondering what her boyfriend is doing. She disturbingly lacks in purpose.
I’m conflicted with Kitamura’s writing style. Firstly, her prose is literary and beautiful. What I did not enjoy was her lack of punctuation, especially her lake of quotation marks and run-on sentences. There were times I needed to reread a paragraph to figure out who was talking and when their dialogue ended. I found that to be distracting and annoying.
Considering that the only thing I can say about this novel is that it’s about an interpreter and her stent at the Hague, it sounds boring and unworthy. The beauty of the novel is that it’s like the old TV series “Seinfeld”: it’s about nothing but it packs a punch. You’ll know if you will like it after the first few pages. It’s not for everyone. It’s beautifully written (other than the grammar parts that I disliked). I was involved from page 1, but I can’t say what the point of the story is, other than literary entertainment.
The narrator left New York city after her father died and her mother left for Singapore. She doesn’t tell the reader, but through her narration we feel that she still has unprocessed grief and some feelings of abandonment. In her quest to get away from her personal issues, she finds herself involved with a married man which adds complications to her already stressful job. She must interpret for war criminals, and one, a former African president, who chooses her for his translator. This man is accused of horrible atrocities involving ethnic cleansing. Her works weighs heavily on her. She must interpret all heinous crimes the president is accountable for ordering.
Back to her married boyfriend. He decides to go to Lisbon to breakup with his wife. He’ll be gone a week at most. He wants her to stay in his apartment while he’s gone. This is strange because their relationship is new, and also it felt wrong….like witnessing a slasher movie when the actors keep doing stupid things that lead to their eventual death. The reader knows this is NOT a good idea. To add to this, he ghosts her and is gone for over a month. So not only is she quietly suffering through her emotionally charged job, she goes home to an empty apartment wondering what her boyfriend is doing. She disturbingly lacks in purpose.
I’m conflicted with Kitamura’s writing style. Firstly, her prose is literary and beautiful. What I did not enjoy was her lack of punctuation, especially her lake of quotation marks and run-on sentences. There were times I needed to reread a paragraph to figure out who was talking and when their dialogue ended. I found that to be distracting and annoying.
Considering that the only thing I can say about this novel is that it’s about an interpreter and her stent at the Hague, it sounds boring and unworthy. The beauty of the novel is that it’s like the old TV series “Seinfeld”: it’s about nothing but it packs a punch. You’ll know if you will like it after the first few pages. It’s not for everyone. It’s beautifully written (other than the grammar parts that I disliked). I was involved from page 1, but I can’t say what the point of the story is, other than literary entertainment.
March 12, 2022
3.5⭐️ rounded up!
“The fact that our daily activity hinged on the repeated description—description, elaboration, and delineation—of matters that were, outside, generally subject to euphemism and elision.”
Our unnamed protagonist (who is also our narrator) has recently taken up a one-year contractual position as an interpreter with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, moving from New York to The Hague, and is still in the process of adjusting to her new life. She is professionally tasked with interpreting for the high profile case of a former West African President, who is being tried for horrific war crimes. Her interaction with the former President was not just limited to her removed presence behind a glass-fronted soundproof booth. She is also required to sit in and interpret for him during his private meetings with his legal counsel.
"The Court was run according to the suspension of disbelief: every person in the courtroom knew but also did not know that there was a great deal of artifice surrounding matters that were nonetheless predicated on authenticity."
On the personal front, she is involved with Adriaan, a married man separated from his wife, yet to be divorced. She also befriends Jana, a curator of an art gallery. Her personal relationships do not appear to be particularly stable, her friendship with Jana feels fragile and Adriaan seems conflicted over the future of his marriage. She also befriends an art history teacher whose brother was recently mugged in the vicinity of Jana’s apartment building but who does not divulge his reasons for being in that area. The novel follows our protagonist as she navigates her personal relationships and professional commitments all the while learning to fend for herself in a new city. The plot of the novel revolves around the varying degrees of intimacy in her professional and personal experiences and how they impact her as an individual and as a professional.
Katie Kitamura‘s Intimacies is a quiet novel, direct and lacking embellishment. The narration at times lacks a ‘personal component’ despite being narrated in the first person by our protagonist. I loved the scenes depicting the proceedings in the Court and found the detailed look into the responsibilities of the translators /interpreters very interesting. The tone of the novel feels so impersonal that I found it very difficult to feel any connection with the protagonist. The novel gives us a look into her personal life – romantic relationships and friendships, the superficial nature of all her personal relationships is very subtly portrayed. In fact, the only point in the novel where the protagonist shows any vulnerability is in the course of her work while interpreting for the former President on trial, a vulnerability that makes her uncomfortable with the very nature of her work.
“It was disquieting in the extreme, like being placed inside a body I had no desire to occupy. I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable.”
This is a unique novel with a very interesting setting and elegant prose but an unconventional plot structure. It is an interesting read, but I think many would find it hard to connect with the protagonist due to the dispassionate tone of the novel and in that it may not appeal to many readers.
"It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, 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."
“The fact that our daily activity hinged on the repeated description—description, elaboration, and delineation—of matters that were, outside, generally subject to euphemism and elision.”
Our unnamed protagonist (who is also our narrator) has recently taken up a one-year contractual position as an interpreter with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, moving from New York to The Hague, and is still in the process of adjusting to her new life. She is professionally tasked with interpreting for the high profile case of a former West African President, who is being tried for horrific war crimes. Her interaction with the former President was not just limited to her removed presence behind a glass-fronted soundproof booth. She is also required to sit in and interpret for him during his private meetings with his legal counsel.
"The Court was run according to the suspension of disbelief: every person in the courtroom knew but also did not know that there was a great deal of artifice surrounding matters that were nonetheless predicated on authenticity."
On the personal front, she is involved with Adriaan, a married man separated from his wife, yet to be divorced. She also befriends Jana, a curator of an art gallery. Her personal relationships do not appear to be particularly stable, her friendship with Jana feels fragile and Adriaan seems conflicted over the future of his marriage. She also befriends an art history teacher whose brother was recently mugged in the vicinity of Jana’s apartment building but who does not divulge his reasons for being in that area. The novel follows our protagonist as she navigates her personal relationships and professional commitments all the while learning to fend for herself in a new city. The plot of the novel revolves around the varying degrees of intimacy in her professional and personal experiences and how they impact her as an individual and as a professional.
Katie Kitamura‘s Intimacies is a quiet novel, direct and lacking embellishment. The narration at times lacks a ‘personal component’ despite being narrated in the first person by our protagonist. I loved the scenes depicting the proceedings in the Court and found the detailed look into the responsibilities of the translators /interpreters very interesting. The tone of the novel feels so impersonal that I found it very difficult to feel any connection with the protagonist. The novel gives us a look into her personal life – romantic relationships and friendships, the superficial nature of all her personal relationships is very subtly portrayed. In fact, the only point in the novel where the protagonist shows any vulnerability is in the course of her work while interpreting for the former President on trial, a vulnerability that makes her uncomfortable with the very nature of her work.
“It was disquieting in the extreme, like being placed inside a body I had no desire to occupy. I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable.”
This is a unique novel with a very interesting setting and elegant prose but an unconventional plot structure. It is an interesting read, but I think many would find it hard to connect with the protagonist due to the dispassionate tone of the novel and in that it may not appeal to many readers.
"It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, 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."
August 7, 2022
I just love novels that feature people who work in politics and international institutions, like The Capital about the EU, or Schutzzone about NGO workers, especially if they deal with idealists who aim to make imperfect systems work, because the alternative would be even more grim. In "Intimacies", our unnamed narrator comes to the Hague to work at the International Criminal Court as a translator. She is adrift, grew up between countries, her father has just passed away and her mother has re-located to Singapore. Now, the narrator wants to build a life in the Netherlands.
The job means that the protagonist has to translate for people who are accused of having committed genocides or crimes against humanity as well as for their victims who give the most gruesome testimonies, which entangles her as the medium in weirdly intimate relationships. At the same time, she enters an affair with Adriaan, a man who has recently been left by his wife.
And yes, Kitamura's writing is indeed reminiscent of Rachel Cusk 's Outline trilogy, as both employ protagonists who keep on interpreting their surroudnings and become mediums for others, while they themselves remain strangely absent, without being able to voice strong emotions or opinions (although the protagonist in "Intimacies" clearly harbors such feelings). Kitamura touches on several moral questions, big (is the ICC serving justice, and if so, what kind?) and small (what is permissible in intimate human relationships?).
The author chooses a very simple and clear language to write about confusion and being adrift, and while I was sometimes bothered that the narrative voice kept me at arm's length, I was also constantly invested in the story and the characters. Kitamura is a fascinating writer with an unusual tone, and I finally need to read A Separation.
The job means that the protagonist has to translate for people who are accused of having committed genocides or crimes against humanity as well as for their victims who give the most gruesome testimonies, which entangles her as the medium in weirdly intimate relationships. At the same time, she enters an affair with Adriaan, a man who has recently been left by his wife.
And yes, Kitamura's writing is indeed reminiscent of Rachel Cusk 's Outline trilogy, as both employ protagonists who keep on interpreting their surroudnings and become mediums for others, while they themselves remain strangely absent, without being able to voice strong emotions or opinions (although the protagonist in "Intimacies" clearly harbors such feelings). Kitamura touches on several moral questions, big (is the ICC serving justice, and if so, what kind?) and small (what is permissible in intimate human relationships?).
The author chooses a very simple and clear language to write about confusion and being adrift, and while I was sometimes bothered that the narrative voice kept me at arm's length, I was also constantly invested in the story and the characters. Kitamura is a fascinating writer with an unusual tone, and I finally need to read A Separation.
December 18, 2021
I didn't expect to like this novel as much as I did - my motivation to read it was more curiosity than excitement. Yet it captivated me. I can't put my finger on why. Perhaps because of Kitamura's graceful and precise writing. A woman makes observations about her work as a translator at The Hague, her relationships and her surroundings. She is cool, but her emotions are simmering under the surface. No conclusions to her dilemmas are offered.
July 10, 2021
4.5 stars
An intelligent and expansive engagement with issues of communication, comprehension, understanding, and the linguistic and other spaces that may open up through which misunderstandings can enter or where language proves inadequate in the face of the unsayability of some actions and events.
Kitamura has crafted a narrative which suggests rather than asserts, in which a brittle narrator drifts in The Hague, and where almost everyone she encounters is experiencing some kind of fragility in their relationships. As an interpreter at the international court at The Hague, the narrator faces issues of how to speak for both witnesses of massacres, and in the voice of the corrupt perpetrator in an international genocide/war crimes trial. What does it mean to represent, even temporarily, the 'I' in other people's narratives?
But there is an equal interest in the smaller intimacies and misunderstandings that appear in close personal relationships, especially here with the narrator's lover, Adriaan, and her friend Jana. There is one whole plot thread of a bookseller who is assaulted that didn't really fit the wider pattern that I could see and which left me a bit stranded, hence the not quite five star rating.
Overall, though, this is a quiet but deeply thoughtful book that I found both impressive and compelling. I disliked Kitamura's previous A Separation but may well go back to it now that I'm attuned to her digressive and suggestive prose. A book I'd be delighted to see on the 2021 Booker list.
Many thanks to Random House Vintage/Jonathan Cape for an ARC via NetGalley
My job is to make the space between languages as small as possible.
I would not obfuscate the meaning of what he had done, of these words that he deemed so insufficient, my job was the ensure that there would be no escape route between languages.
An intelligent and expansive engagement with issues of communication, comprehension, understanding, and the linguistic and other spaces that may open up through which misunderstandings can enter or where language proves inadequate in the face of the unsayability of some actions and events.
Kitamura has crafted a narrative which suggests rather than asserts, in which a brittle narrator drifts in The Hague, and where almost everyone she encounters is experiencing some kind of fragility in their relationships. As an interpreter at the international court at The Hague, the narrator faces issues of how to speak for both witnesses of massacres, and in the voice of the corrupt perpetrator in an international genocide/war crimes trial. What does it mean to represent, even temporarily, the 'I' in other people's narratives?
But there is an equal interest in the smaller intimacies and misunderstandings that appear in close personal relationships, especially here with the narrator's lover, Adriaan, and her friend Jana. There is one whole plot thread of a bookseller who is assaulted that didn't really fit the wider pattern that I could see and which left me a bit stranded, hence the not quite five star rating.
Overall, though, this is a quiet but deeply thoughtful book that I found both impressive and compelling. I disliked Kitamura's previous A Separation but may well go back to it now that I'm attuned to her digressive and suggestive prose. A book I'd be delighted to see on the 2021 Booker list.
Many thanks to Random House Vintage/Jonathan Cape for an ARC via NetGalley
August 26, 2022
My fifth 2 star book in a row 😭 when will I know peace!!!!!
July 24, 2022
Intimacies is a book I admired more than enjoyed. Kitamura is a sharp, insightful writer, capable of stringing together lean, muscular sentences to form thoughtful passages. The experience of reading her, for me, was effortless, her rhythm of writing guiding me naturally along. When the material was incisive, such as describing her translating job or the emotional tenor of a war criminal's facial expressions, I was entranced. When the material faltered, such as the narrator's many moments reflecting on the void left by a man she barely knows, I found my thoughts drifting off, retaining very little.
The narrator is often usurped by more intriguing secondary characters, for better or worse, and the scene's velocity depends on who is in the room with her. At the same time, there are quiet, emotional revelations that are quite stunning, collapsing the distance between writer and narrator almost entirely. I must say I am surprised how neatly she tied the ending up, given the ambiguity of much of the book.
The narrator is often usurped by more intriguing secondary characters, for better or worse, and the scene's velocity depends on who is in the room with her. At the same time, there are quiet, emotional revelations that are quite stunning, collapsing the distance between writer and narrator almost entirely. I must say I am surprised how neatly she tied the ending up, given the ambiguity of much of the book.
December 12, 2022
So I kind of detested this book when I first finished it, then I went to my Boston Asian book club and liked it a little more. I can see how Katie Kitamura writes about her protagonist’s difficulty with intimacy and asserting herself in professional and personal spaces. The unnamed protagonist’s job as an interpreter dovetailed interestingly with her desire to observe others and fade into the background.
Unfortunately I found several other elements of the book lacking. First, I didn’t understand why the protagonist had such an intense desire for the white male love interest Adriaan. Like, I get that he’s privileged and wealthy and that might afford a sense of stability, but I wish Kitamura interrogated that desire or relationship as opposed to filling the novel with cliché phrases about longing. The opaquer writing style made it hard for me to feel invested in Intimacies. Finally, I wanted more growth from the protagonist on her journey; the book felt stagnant to me even though the main character perhaps made minor changes in her life.
Other novels that come to mind written by women of color about or related to intimacy that I loved include Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, A World Between by Emily Hashimoto, and You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat.
Unfortunately I found several other elements of the book lacking. First, I didn’t understand why the protagonist had such an intense desire for the white male love interest Adriaan. Like, I get that he’s privileged and wealthy and that might afford a sense of stability, but I wish Kitamura interrogated that desire or relationship as opposed to filling the novel with cliché phrases about longing. The opaquer writing style made it hard for me to feel invested in Intimacies. Finally, I wanted more growth from the protagonist on her journey; the book felt stagnant to me even though the main character perhaps made minor changes in her life.
Other novels that come to mind written by women of color about or related to intimacy that I loved include Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, A World Between by Emily Hashimoto, and You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat.
July 30, 2021
(4.5) Kitamura’s is writing that epitomises the phrase ‘deceptively simple’. Intimacies is a brief, seemingly straightforward novel that’s made complex, rich and endlessly fascinating by its storytelling. It’s a precise study of how we move through the world, written so instinctively it seems to reveal momentous truths without effort.
The narrator, an interpreter from a rootless and itinerant background, has moved to The Hague to take up a year-long contract at the International Court of Justice (or simply ‘the Court’, as it is referred to here). As the story begins, she has been assigned to a high-profile trial, providing interpretation for a controversial former West African president. Meanwhile, a difficult situation emerges in her personal life. Her (somewhat distant) boyfriend, Adriaan, leaves the narrator living alone in his apartment while he visits his ex-wife and children in Portugal. At first his return seems guaranteed, but as the weeks go by and Adriaan neither comes back nor contacts her, the narrator begins to suspect he has reunited with his ex – and must decide what to do about what now seems a very strange living arrangement.
That’s the plot, but this is the kind of story that unfolds in small details, in moments, in thoughts. It’s called Intimacies, it centres on an interpreter, and it’s about those two things: intimacy and interpretation. In the same way that imagination was so important in A Separation, the narrator’s levels of interpretation are key to the atmosphere of Intimacies. Time and time again we are made privy to the narrator’s assumptions about a person or situation, only for her to be proven wrong moments later, and needing to reconfigure her way of perceiving things, sometimes multiple times in a single scene. This is, of course, very true to life, but so unlike how a fictional character’s interior monologue is usually represented; the effect is startling.
This approach can result in palpable tension, as when the narrator arrives for dinner with Adriaan and her friend Jana and, despite the two supposedly having not met before, finds them in what seems to be a state of collusion. While this is not a dangerous situation, the possibilities simmer with menace in a way that makes it almost frightening. Several scenes throughout the book in which the narrator encounters men she does not know – a party, another dinner, a rendezvous with the former president and his team – depict her constantly reassessing her judgement, recallibrating herself accordingly. These scenes of Kitamura’s appear to me like those tiny, perfect oil paintings or watercolours you sometimes see, very small – nothing to look at from a distance – but created with extreme skill and precision, the detail expertly condensed.
If I still cared about the Booker Prize, I’d’ve thought this a dead cert for the longlist/shortlist. There were so many points when I thought, this is exactly what I want literary fiction to do: capture reality in a way that makes it new.
I received an advance review copy of Intimacies from the publisher through Edelweiss.
TinyLetter | Linktree
The narrator, an interpreter from a rootless and itinerant background, has moved to The Hague to take up a year-long contract at the International Court of Justice (or simply ‘the Court’, as it is referred to here). As the story begins, she has been assigned to a high-profile trial, providing interpretation for a controversial former West African president. Meanwhile, a difficult situation emerges in her personal life. Her (somewhat distant) boyfriend, Adriaan, leaves the narrator living alone in his apartment while he visits his ex-wife and children in Portugal. At first his return seems guaranteed, but as the weeks go by and Adriaan neither comes back nor contacts her, the narrator begins to suspect he has reunited with his ex – and must decide what to do about what now seems a very strange living arrangement.
That’s the plot, but this is the kind of story that unfolds in small details, in moments, in thoughts. It’s called Intimacies, it centres on an interpreter, and it’s about those two things: intimacy and interpretation. In the same way that imagination was so important in A Separation, the narrator’s levels of interpretation are key to the atmosphere of Intimacies. Time and time again we are made privy to the narrator’s assumptions about a person or situation, only for her to be proven wrong moments later, and needing to reconfigure her way of perceiving things, sometimes multiple times in a single scene. This is, of course, very true to life, but so unlike how a fictional character’s interior monologue is usually represented; the effect is startling.
This approach can result in palpable tension, as when the narrator arrives for dinner with Adriaan and her friend Jana and, despite the two supposedly having not met before, finds them in what seems to be a state of collusion. While this is not a dangerous situation, the possibilities simmer with menace in a way that makes it almost frightening. Several scenes throughout the book in which the narrator encounters men she does not know – a party, another dinner, a rendezvous with the former president and his team – depict her constantly reassessing her judgement, recallibrating herself accordingly. These scenes of Kitamura’s appear to me like those tiny, perfect oil paintings or watercolours you sometimes see, very small – nothing to look at from a distance – but created with extreme skill and precision, the detail expertly condensed.
If I still cared about the Booker Prize, I’d’ve thought this a dead cert for the longlist/shortlist. There were so many points when I thought, this is exactly what I want literary fiction to do: capture reality in a way that makes it new.
I received an advance review copy of Intimacies from the publisher through Edelweiss.
TinyLetter | Linktree
July 19, 2021
At the opening of Katie Kitamura’s intense, unsettling new novel, “Intimacies,” an unnamed narrator has left New York in a fugue of grief and signed a one-year contract in The Hague. “I rode the tram without purpose and walked for hours at a time,” she tells us, “so that I would sometimes become lost and need to consult the map on my phone.”
This woman knows no one in The Hague, which allows her to concentrate more than she might like on the legendary city with its “veneer of civility.” The harder she looks, the more she sees beneath the “docile surface” of the streets. Her insistent perception — the real action of this novel — is her greatest skill and her riskiest vulnerability.
“Intimacies” is very much a story that seems to be something familiar but soon morphs into something disorientingly strange. Soon after arriving in The Hague, the narrator begins dating a handsome man named Adriaan. Little has been articulated, but much assumed between them. “There was already a certain amount of routine to the way we were together,��� she says. “That regularity had many possible meanings and was difficult to interpret, at times I thought it was the expression of an intrinsic ease between us, some deep familiarity superseding our many differences.”
One of those differences is that he has a wife and family. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
This woman knows no one in The Hague, which allows her to concentrate more than she might like on the legendary city with its “veneer of civility.” The harder she looks, the more she sees beneath the “docile surface” of the streets. Her insistent perception — the real action of this novel — is her greatest skill and her riskiest vulnerability.
“Intimacies” is very much a story that seems to be something familiar but soon morphs into something disorientingly strange. Soon after arriving in The Hague, the narrator begins dating a handsome man named Adriaan. Little has been articulated, but much assumed between them. “There was already a certain amount of routine to the way we were together,��� she says. “That regularity had many possible meanings and was difficult to interpret, at times I thought it was the expression of an intrinsic ease between us, some deep familiarity superseding our many differences.”
One of those differences is that he has a wife and family. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
July 23, 2021
Simple story written in a simple and clear language and yet some magic happened and I was instantly sucked in. I had a connection to the protagonist I suppose, the way she feels lost, like an outsider and an imposter.
I can see how for some readers this book would be plotless and slow and maybe hollow. But the moodiness of the piece just worked for me, as it did for Barack Obama. It's a quiet melancholic story, and yet it ends with a promise of home and connection.
I thought of Adriaan, it occurred to me that this was the world he had inhabited with Gaby. They would have circulated through this room with ease, I was sure that between them they would have known most of the people in attendance, in some ways it was their world even more than it was Jana’s. I felt a rush of fear crowd into me. I was not of this place.
I realized I had been trying to occupy the apartment in as discreet a manner as possible, as if to illustrate to Adriaan upon his return how easily I would slip into the fabric of his life, how little disturbance I would cause. To understand this was humiliating. I was a woman waiting for a lover, dressed in obscene lingerie, body arrayed on the bed in a pose of hopeful seduction.
I had been complicit in my own erasure.
Where is home?
My family’s now in Singapore. Before that I lived in New York.
I thought—I want to go home. I want to be in a place that feels like home. Where that was, I did not know.
I can see how for some readers this book would be plotless and slow and maybe hollow. But the moodiness of the piece just worked for me, as it did for Barack Obama. It's a quiet melancholic story, and yet it ends with a promise of home and connection.
July 28, 2021
Katie Kitamura writes with a very European literary sensibility - a sparse style, with emotions held in check, and main characters who are rather withdrawn. I love that. It is all very measured and controlled, and I am constantly assured that she knows exactly the effect of every action, phrase, and word she chooses. An unnamed narrator moves from New York to The Hague for a job as an interpreter at the International Court. She is finding her way in the city, deciding whether she wants to stay and making a few friends, while at the same time being involved in interpreting for a former president accused of human rights violations and atrocities in his own country. Intimacies is a perfect title - the novel is about getting close to people but not always knowing what is going on under the surface.
October 5, 2022
Anfangs mutete es wie eine Liebesgeschichte an,
was überhaupt nichts für mich gewesen wär,
dann kam etwas Psycho hinzu, und ich war mir sicher,
da kommt noch der Knaller.
Das Ende war überraschenderweise dann doch
etwas halbherzig und kraftlos.
was überhaupt nichts für mich gewesen wär,
dann kam etwas Psycho hinzu, und ich war mir sicher,
da kommt noch der Knaller.
Das Ende war überraschenderweise dann doch
etwas halbherzig und kraftlos.
August 23, 2022
3.5
Well, hooray I read my first book in what feels likes weeks. It helped that Kitamura has a very cool and calming style which I was pleasantly lulled by. This novel is a whisper in your ear rather than a big thunderclap.
However, if you asked me what this book is about, I would struggle to tell you. Intimacy? the word is there on the cover and mentioned several times throughout. Interpreting? yes, certainty. The inner workings of the International Criminal Courts and the mindset of war criminals? - a little but crucially not enough.
Unfortunately, it is also about lots of fragmentary relationships between individuals that I cared not a jot about. I have a very hazy understanding of why Adriaan was considered worthy of much time ( dude, answer your phone you pompous ass ). For a serious-sounding novel, the fact that my takeaway emotion is primarily one of annoyance for lack of minor character communication- is a problem.
Not for the first time this year I am left wanting a reading experience with a little more pizzazz.
Well, hooray I read my first book in what feels likes weeks. It helped that Kitamura has a very cool and calming style which I was pleasantly lulled by. This novel is a whisper in your ear rather than a big thunderclap.
However, if you asked me what this book is about, I would struggle to tell you. Intimacy? the word is there on the cover and mentioned several times throughout. Interpreting? yes, certainty. The inner workings of the International Criminal Courts and the mindset of war criminals? - a little but crucially not enough.
Unfortunately, it is also about lots of fragmentary relationships between individuals that I cared not a jot about. I have a very hazy understanding of why Adriaan was considered worthy of much time ( dude, answer your phone you pompous ass ). For a serious-sounding novel, the fact that my takeaway emotion is primarily one of annoyance for lack of minor character communication- is a problem.
Not for the first time this year I am left wanting a reading experience with a little more pizzazz.
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October 15, 2022DNF 50%
Não, obrigada, abasteci-me há pouco de Valdispert.
Em busca de reviews que me orientassem, porque a meio de "Intimidades" continuava perdida, encontrei uma que comparava o namorado da protagonista a pão bimbo. É que nem mais! Seguindo essa ordem de ideias, a protagonista é uma insípida bolacha maria e os malfeitores em julgamento no tribunal de Haia parecem um pacote de bolachinhas de água e sal aberto há mais de quinze dias.
A minha personagem preferida é a mulher do namorado, que nem sequer aparece, e que se pirou para Lisboa antes de o livro começar. Eu devia ter feito o mesmo...
Não, obrigada, abasteci-me há pouco de Valdispert.
Em busca de reviews que me orientassem, porque a meio de "Intimidades" continuava perdida, encontrei uma que comparava o namorado da protagonista a pão bimbo. É que nem mais! Seguindo essa ordem de ideias, a protagonista é uma insípida bolacha maria e os malfeitores em julgamento no tribunal de Haia parecem um pacote de bolachinhas de água e sal aberto há mais de quinze dias.
A minha personagem preferida é a mulher do namorado, que nem sequer aparece, e que se pirou para Lisboa antes de o livro começar. Eu devia ter feito o mesmo...
March 5, 2023
A novel about transience, translation, identity. A quiet meditation on finding one’s place in this ever-changing world. Gorgeously written and expertly paced.
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