“Intimacies“ by Katie Kitamura:
A mysterious novel about a woman adrift in her own life and a new city. A story which constantly asks: Where do I belong? It is a tale that at first seems to be all too familiar but soon morphs into something bewilderingly strange.
After discovering that her new boyfriend Adriaan is a married man with a family, the narrator, a young woman interpreter who recently moved to The Hague to start a contract job at the International Court, feels that “the appearance of simplicity is not the same thing as simplicity itself“. This feeling extents to almost every aspect of her life, personal and professional.
Very little do we know of the narrator’s life or history. She came to The Hague by way of New York, her father has just died and her mother has returned to Singapore. Her age and ethnicity are never precisely mentioned. Despite this little information we slowly begin to establish a connection with her.
We are offered an interesting insight into the inner workings of the International Court, we get a sense of how it is to constantly maneuver between meanings and languages and furthermore we form the impression of both the importance and the futility of the International Criminal Court. We learn that the Court primarily prosecutes crimes against humanity in African nations, becoming an "ineffectual" instrument of "Western imperialism”.
At her work in the Court, responsible for translating legal proceedings for the defense of a genocidal former heads of state who is accused of cruel injustice against ethnic minorities, she and the accused develop a predator-prey dynamic, with the narrator simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the accused's ruthlessness and absence of remorse.
Despite her skill and discipline “great chasms between words, between two or more languages“ open up without warning. There seems to be a strange dichotomy of presence and absence simultaneously at work. “Interpretation can be profoundly disorienting,” she reflects, “You can be so caught up in the minutiae of the interpreting 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.”
Outside of work she looks for what anyone moving alone to a new city would be looking for, namely friendship and love. Cracks in her professional and private life open up and widen. A mugging takes place outside her friend’s apartment and she develops an obsessive interest in the victim, an antiquarian book seller. Her boyfriend Adriaan asks her to await his return in his apartment while he flies to Lisbon to divorce his estranged wife, but days become weeks and he stops texting and her sense of insecurity increases. The novel slowly acquires an uncanny atmosphere of threat though it is not clear where that threat originates. “I want to be in a place that feels like home,” she thinks but “where that is, I don’t know”.
She keeps functioning apparently normal, does what everyone else does, she eats, works at her job, makes friends, maintains friendships but at the same time is adrift and unsteady. Her attentions are mostly directed outward, towards others, their lives, their problems, only rarely do her thoughts turn inward and when they do they heighten her sense of being lost and adrift. She often uses the words Intimacies or Intimate and seems to crave these conditions while being aware of their elusiveness.
The intimate situations she is involved in are mostly described from an observational distance, she describes her friendship with her woman-friend Jana, talks of her relation with her boyfriend Adriaan, speaks of an intrusive approach of a man at a private party. Once she briefly reflects on her former family life, she meets the sister of the mugged book seller and the bookseller himself whom she later watches in intimate embrace with a woman not his wife. The strangest intimacy she develops with the accused criminal president at her work. In all these cases she mostly confines herself to just watch and describe. It is not exactly a voyeuristic view she inhabits but a cooly detached, almost scientific one.
We try to connect with her but her cool observant way makes it hard to establish a real emotional bond. Kitamura brings us into intimate spaces between people while keeping her distance.
This is a tale of the familiar inability to create a coherent narrative of our own life. The summary of the novel’s plot does not do it justice, there is more at issue than just the story, themes of duplicity, questionable morality, politics, sexual tension. Intimacies is a novel for the brain. In her cool detached tone Kitamura does not offer pre-configured easy judgement on moral questions. The right behavior, the sole and righteous position on complex issues is left to the reader.
In sparing, clear, assertive and straightforward prose, in interesting contrast with the complexity of her characters, and her quiet observational mood Kitamura creates a confounding, labyrinthine tale of someone in search of a personal narrative. And as we all know, within the labyrinth, there, at the heart, lurks a Beast.
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