A Review of Katie Kimamura’s Intimacies (Riverhead, 2021).
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trihal
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Tripat Rihal
I’ve gotten in the bad habit again of taking a little bit too much time away from reviewing. I read Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies about a month ago, and it was such an intriguing read. Let’s let the official marketing description get us some key information: “An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home. She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes. A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.”
As someone familiar with most of Kitamura’s publications, I had a similar feeling while reading through this text: dread. There is something about Kitamura’s work, where you always feel like something bad is around the corner. For this particular novel, the bad is pretty much everywhere in the sense that our unnamed protagonist is not sure about the state of her relationship with Adriian. This relationship is refracted on a larger level by the murkiness that the interpreter faces as a kind of conduit of communication when it comes to war crimes cases that are being held at the Hague. As the protagonist comes to realize, the work of interpretation seems as largely subjective as the ethics in which so many of these cases are sometimes wrapped. This kind of ambiguity is the land in which readers are mired; you’re worried at every stage not only for the protagonist, but for the larger cultures and communities that are subsisting.
What I especially love about this particular text is Kitamura’s very effective use of first person narration: we feel this protagonist’s sense of claustrophobia, as she struggles to figure out whether or not she should stay in the Hague, remain an interpreter, and whether or not she can find a home there. We feel her unsettlement when she does not know when Adriaan returns from a trip meant to last only a week. We feel horror once we realize that the protagonist must work closely with someone that Adriaan knows, and who happens to be a major defense lawyer. If you’ve read Kitamura’s last two novels, then you know that characters don’t always survive. Really terrible things can happen, and I was especially worried about the many figures in this particular text. I will say that Kitamura’s conclusion gives us a minor salve, one that I thought was especially fitting given so much gloom that is palpable within this fictional world.
Buy the Book Here
comments
trihal
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Tripat Rihal
I’ve gotten in the bad habit again of taking a little bit too much time away from reviewing. I read Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies about a month ago, and it was such an intriguing read. Let’s let the official marketing description get us some key information: “An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home. She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes. A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.”
As someone familiar with most of Kitamura’s publications, I had a similar feeling while reading through this text: dread. There is something about Kitamura’s work, where you always feel like something bad is around the corner. For this particular novel, the bad is pretty much everywhere in the sense that our unnamed protagonist is not sure about the state of her relationship with Adriian. This relationship is refracted on a larger level by the murkiness that the interpreter faces as a kind of conduit of communication when it comes to war crimes cases that are being held at the Hague. As the protagonist comes to realize, the work of interpretation seems as largely subjective as the ethics in which so many of these cases are sometimes wrapped. This kind of ambiguity is the land in which readers are mired; you’re worried at every stage not only for the protagonist, but for the larger cultures and communities that are subsisting.
What I especially love about this particular text is Kitamura’s very effective use of first person narration: we feel this protagonist’s sense of claustrophobia, as she struggles to figure out whether or not she should stay in the Hague, remain an interpreter, and whether or not she can find a home there. We feel her unsettlement when she does not know when Adriaan returns from a trip meant to last only a week. We feel horror once we realize that the protagonist must work closely with someone that Adriaan knows, and who happens to be a major defense lawyer. If you’ve read Kitamura’s last two novels, then you know that characters don’t always survive. Really terrible things can happen, and I was especially worried about the many figures in this particular text. I will say that Kitamura’s conclusion gives us a minor salve, one that I thought was especially fitting given so much gloom that is palpable within this fictional world.
Buy the Book Here
comments
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