Intimacies

This is a powerful, densely written little book that leaves the reader pondering after each chapter and upon finishing the book. The un-named narrator is presumably an Asian female who grew up traveling the globe with her parents. When her father dies in New York City after a prolonged illness, her mother retreats to Singapore. The narrator accepts a position as a translator at an international court at The Hague.
As she narrates her days and her experiences, despite having great facility with language, her sense of dislocation and lack of belonging is a constant presence. There are crystallized observations of many aspects of intimacy between people which she experiences as an outsider. Those few incidents where there seem to be an show more 'intimacy', both verbal and nonverbal, toward her are often abuses of power.
There are some beautifully written passages especially chapter 10 where she is making observations of paintings at an art exhibit.
There are also some powerful insights about the power of language, it's uses and abuses. At one point, when she is baited by the West African former president who favors her for interpretation in his proceedings, she replies to him "My job is to make the space between languages as small as possible."
At 225 pages, it's a relatively short book, but I found that I had to stop and digest the material along the way. It is not a book that I could take in during a binge reading session. show less

I like the light touch Kitamura uses, the slight remove of language and culture that helps the reader feel the main character's alienation. Although it's a specific situation, a literal difference in language and culture for the character as an American living in The Netherlands, it seems familiar and perhaps universal, as if there's always something lost in translation whenever two people interact. Like life, it leaves me wanting.

“As the minutes stretched onward, I began to lose track of what was actually under discussion. 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. And yet… something did seep out. I saw the words: cross border raid, mass grave, armed youth.”

The novel’s unnamed Japanese American protagonist has just moved from New York to The Hague to work as a translator for an international criminal court. show more She speaks English, Japanese, and French. Her father has died, and her mother has moved to Singapore. She develops a friendship with an art curator and forms a relationship with a married man (who says he and his wife are in the process of divorcing). She is eventually assigned to work with the defense team for an unnamed West African dictator, who is alleged to have ordered ethnic cleansing after losing an election. It is set in 2016, when the UK Brexit referendum and American presidential election are imminent.

The protagonist navigates moral uncertainties involved in her job. She finds herself wondering if she is rooting for the ex-dictator even in the face of overwhelming evidence against him. She seems to lose her values and becomes extremely indecisive, both in her professional and personal life. She allows the married man to treat her as a low priority.

This book got me to thinking about the many different types of intimacies and they are almost all covered in this story. Some characters push the boundaries of intimacy, implying it exists when it does not. There are situations where one character tries to manipulate another through false intimacy. There are instances of over-sharing. The writing is fittingly intimate, too.

It is subtle and quiet, while also raising important questions about the nature of interpersonal and working relationships. I loved everything about this novel. I think I may have found a new favorite author. I need to check out Kitamura’s catalogue. show less

The unnamed and almost neurotically self-aware narrator of Katie Kitamura’s 4th novel, Intimacies, has arrived in The Hague after being hired to work as an interpreter at the international Court. She is a young woman of many languages with a hazy past whose life to this point (we’re led to believe) has been one of emotional aloofness and few meaningful attachments (only child, father recently dead, mother living in Singapore). Coming from New York, upon her arrival in The Hague she remains unmoored, quietly observant of her new surroundings but hardly committed to them. At the outset, her friend Jana is her only social connection, though once she settles in to work at the Court, she develops amiable associations with some of her show more colleagues. The novel’s main action revolves around several incidents in which she becomes embroiled to varying degrees and which leave an indelible emotional impression. At a reception she meets Adriaan. The two become lovers, the narrator soon preferring his apartment to her own, though many of Adriaan’s estranged wife’s belongings are in evidence. Adriaan’s marriage, though on the point of collapse, still consumes his time and energy, and at about the novel’s midpoint, compelled to deal with marriage-related issues, he travels to Lisbon where his wife is living, leaving the narrator in the lurch, wondering where she stands when he falls silent and remains absent much longer than she’d been led to expect. Another disorienting incident is an assault that takes place on the street outside Jana’s building. Through Jana the narrator meets the assault victim and his sister, an experience that leaves her knowing far more about these people—virtual strangers—than she’s comfortable with. At the Court, she is assigned to the case of the ex-president of a West-African country who is accused of violent crimes associated with his attempt to cling to power after losing an election. On several occasions she is brought into a meeting room to translate, where the ex-president behaves toward her in an insinuating manner that is highly inappropriate and unsettling, finally accusing her of working in collaboration with his accusers. Many of the narrator’s activities outside the Court are routine—meeting someone for coffee or lunch, attending a reception or gallery opening—but the combination of Kitamura’s clipped prose and the narrator’s uneasy perspective generate considerable suspense and foreboding. In Intimacies, made up of a series of concise and emotionally charged episodes, Katie Kitamura depicts her narrator’s growing anxiety as she navigates a path through the intimate and often confusing encounters that shape her days and influence her perception of a city that remains largely unknown to her, and which leave her questioning her place in a world that at every step seems to frustrate her attempts to comprehend it. show less

Man oh man this is an odd little book. The prose is cut glass, the examination of dissonance and rootlessness and community is profound and beautiful, the lens on colonialism/post colonialism subtle and thought-provoking, the emotional remove sometimes chilling even though it never got in my way in feeling deeply for our protagonist (who I do not think has a name, if she does I missed it.) And I was surprised to find in the end it was hopeful, hinting that maybe we can temper dissonance and rootlessness by redefining home. I also have a lot to chew on from her depiction of how we as a people value the ability to achieve emotional remove (she used the word "equanimity" and it was surprising for me to realize they were synonymous though show more the first is looked at as negative and the second as positive.) The setting in the Hague, and especially in the International Criminal Court also left a lot to think about, and perfectly suited the narrative. The Hague has always felt to me like the least engaging or homey place I can imagine, perhaps because of its internationality (though I can see the UN from my office window and I don't feel that in New York) and so it was a perfect backdrop to a story in part about defining the concept of home in a globalized world.

This book is not for everyone. There is not really a plot though there are many interesting subjects glanced over, and as a reader I created stories around those subjects. The main character is perhaps a bit too hazy for people to feel connected to her (as someone who has moved around a good bit and spent long stretches of time in cities on three continents she may be more graspable for me than for people who have lived their lives in one place surrounded by people and things they know.) This is not an easy read -- you need to grapple with it and find its truths. For me those were all plusses, and I will be going back to read Kitamura's last book, and I imagine also her next. 4.5 it is. show less

Finished reading Katie Kitamura's Intimacies this morning. It was a beautifully written first person account of a woman who takes a job as a translator at The Hague. She has moved from her home in NYC, following the death of her father and her mother's return to Singapore. "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...I understood how much my parents had anchored me to this place none of us were from." As she begins a new job and gets acquainted with the city, she is introduced, through a mutual friend,to a woman named Jana who curates an art gallery. "She entered my life at a moment when I was more than usually susceptible to the promise of show more intimacy." While at her house for dinner, police sirens interrupt their conversation and we come to find out that Jana does not live in the best of areas. In fact a man is attacked that night and this too becomes part of the narrative. She also meets a man named Adriaan at a gallery party and they become a quick couple. At The Hague she learns quickly and becomes involved in a big, newsworthy trial against a former President of a West African nation, becomes his translator. In addition she strangely occupies her boyfriend's apartment while he goes to Lisbon to either break up or reignite with his wife. She also interacts with a couple girlfriends and some drama around how one friend's brother was mugged. So though there is not a great deal of plot, the story is mesmerizing, her unmoored feeling, her internal rationales, her sense of others. It is as the title suggests a story about intimacies. Between her job and the boyfriend there are decisions that will have to be made.
I have to say the writing carried the story along, really giving the reader this sense of transition. Her internal dialogue reminded me of Ferrante or Lahiri- meaning good company. I'd be very interested in her other works.
Lines:
That was, I thought, the prospect offered by a new relationship, the opportunity to be someone other than yourself.

no matter where he was he never looked anything other than a man at home.

I realized, belatedly, that she had likely applied the makeup for Adriaan’s sake; certainly she had not done so for mine. I wondered then what it was like to be a man, so often surrounded by such deliberate features, more vivid than actual nature.

I realized how removed the apartment was from the stream of life outside, through the miracles of double glazing and insulation.

And I realized that for him I was pure instrument, someone without will or judgment, a consciousness-free zone into which he could escape, the only company he could now bear—that, that was the reason why he had requested my presence, that was the reason I was there.

That layering—in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity—was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography.

Over the course of those long hours in the booth, I sometimes had the unpleasant sensation that of all the people in the room below, of all the people in the city itself, the former president was the person I knew best.

I saw uncertainty spread through the building, blooming like mold. show less

Trending toward 5, this is so well done and so fascinating. The unnamed narrator is a professional translator and when she makes a new start at the International Court at the Hague, she is adjusting to a new location, a new facet of her work, and new relationships. Settling into a new location is not too difficult given the (wealthy) vagabond life she had growing up, though Dutch is one language she doesn't know. Her job involves translating for international trials of war crimes, so the stakes are pretty high and causes her to think a lot about what it means to interpret someone else's words. New relationships include a friend, Jana who is a museum curator, and Adriaan, a love interest who has the baggage of a faltering marriage and 2 show more children. There is an overarching theme of change, and the upheaval, even violence that sometimes goes with it that plays out nicely in the day to day aspects of the narrator's life. Several events converge: Adriaan leaves for more than a month to sort his marriage, staying incommunicado; a violent crime takes place outside Jana's apartment complex, and the narrator is assigned to a deposed African president accused of crimes against humanity. She does much soul searching in this interim and learns things about herself that she had been avoiding. (intimacy) The story is beautifully executed with the exactitude of language fitting to someone whose job it is to choose words carefully. Its topics and action beg for discussion as do some of its observations: "But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in – this world, occupying as it does a contradiction between its banality and its extremity, is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. 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. (92) show less