Review of INTIMACIES by Katie Kitamura

 3 Stars

I came across this title on Barack Obama’s 2021 reading list and so decided to pick it up.  Perhaps my indifference comes from my reading the book while on a travelling vacation, but it left me underwhelmed. 

An unnamed protagonist is working as a translator at The Hague for the International Criminal Court.  In her professional life, she works at the trial of a West African former president charged with crimes against humanity.  In her personal life, she becomes involved with Adriaan, a Dutch man who turns out to be married.  She moves into his apartment while he goes to Lisbon to see his estranged wife to seek a divorce.

Though she performs her job very well, she seems utterly adrift.  She has a temporary contract at work and lives in a furnished apartment intended for temporary residence.  She is stuck between languages and cultures and is involved with a man who is himself adrift.  She spends her time observing and making as “little disturbance” as possible.

One of the themes is that of superficiality:  “people behave with such conscious and unconscious dishonesty all the time” and “our own behavior shifted according to whether or not we thought we were being seen.”

Another theme is that our perceptions of people are based on contexts that can change quickly:  “Every certainty can give way without notice.”  In her work, for instance, she is aware that tone and word choice while translating can affect the court’s perception of what was said and the person who spoke.  Her opinion of people changes often when she learns more details or sees people in a different setting.  For example, she has one impression of a friend’s brother but then when she sees him with a woman in a restaurant, she concludes, “I understood that Anton was attractive, a man with no small powers of fascination.”  She also notices how a comment causes a woman to change “her image of me.”

I found the book scattered; there are a number of scenes which are intended only to convey the theme in yet another way.  The main character attends an art exhibit and muses on the superiority of painting to photography in being able to capture more than one emotion.  Paintings have laying, “in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity.” 

The writing style is dense.  Diction is complex; for instance, logorrheic is not a word used in ordinary conversation.  There are no chapter titles.  Quotation marks are eschewed, but comma splices abound.  I kept looking for a rationale for the grammatically non-traditional style. 

Other readers will probably find a great deal in this book, but it didn’t grab my attention and I just don’t care enough to give more thought to it. The characters are not interesting; the protagonist left me unmoved and the word milquetoast perfectly describes Adriaan.  If I became more intimate with Intimacies, perhaps my perception would change, but other more interesting books beckon.