Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, was released on July 20th of last year and has subsequently taken the world by storm with its simmering intensity and eerie atmosphere. The novel is about an unnamed woman of the world: she can speak many languages, has no real home, and her work could take her anywhere. At the start of the novel, the narrator is a few months into a year-long assignment as an interpreter in the Hague at an international court. She is suited to the work, and soon enough is called to interpret for a former West African president on trial for the most egregious of crimes.
A startling portrait of the personal consequences of working at the court, Intimacies follows the narrator as she becomes increasingly embroiled in her relationships, and navigates the challenges of translation. Intimacies is a fitting title: the novel follows the closeness and the familiarity that the narrator builds with her married lover Adriaan, with her friend Jana, with the sister of the victim of a random act of violence, and even with the former president for whom she interprets.
And yet there is an ever present sense of dread as events unfold, and the reader realizes the narrator’s reluctance to engage in her own life beyond translation. Her skill as an interpreter is even reflected even in the way she tells her own story. Her language is detached and abrupt, and the dialogue is interspersed without quotation marks, as if it were unclear where one person’s words disconnect with her own. Kitamura sprinkles in clues to illuminate the narrator here and there: her mother is from Singapore, her father died of an illness and was her anchor to New York, she desires to build a home in the Hague. But scant clues are all the audience receives, and the unnamed woman at the novel’s center seems unsure whose story she is meant to be telling.
Intimacies balances multiple truths all at once, while still managing to connect an audience to a narrator with very little of herself to offer. Worth the read, and impossible to put down, Kitamura’s fourth novel is a triumph that will sit with you long after you’ve finished it.
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