Intimacies
From the Booker Prize longlisted author of Audition
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4.0 • 18 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Captivating' Elif Shafak
'Charged with tension and power' Avni Doshi
'Simply stunning' Brandon Taylor 'Gorgeous' Raven Leilani
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.
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.
'One of my favourite novels of the past few years' Caleb Azumah Nelson
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kitamura's plodding latest (after A Separation) follows a group of jet-setting young professionals in The Hague, where a translator finds herself enmeshed in the private lives of her colleagues. There's something vaguely unseemly about the unnamed translator's married suitor, Adriaan, as well as other characters, including her boss in Language Services, the preppy curator she house-sits for, and a book dealer who is mugged during a recent wave of violence. But it's hard to discern what anybody is actually up to. Meanwhile, in the courts, the translator is entrusted with the cases of a recently extradited jihadist and a well-heeled former president of a West African country on trial for war crimes, with whom she must match wits. There are, unfortunately, plenty of unused opportunities for deeper character development; Adriaan in particular is built up as a nemesis, but he does little more than preen, while even less can be said of the various other dilettantes and sexual rivals. Subtle to a fault, this adds up to very little outside of a plethora of dinner scenes and undeveloped subplots, while the translator simply drifts through a Henry James–style chronicle of life abroad. Kitamura is a talented writer, but this one disappoints.
Customer Reviews
High quality prose
Author
American of Japanese extraction. Princeton graduate. PhD in American Literature from the London Consortium. Married to British novelist Hari Kunzru and lives in London. Her previous novel, A Separation (2017), about the breakdown of a marriage (surprise, surprise), is being adapted for the screen. This, her fourth, is a Barack Obama summer reading pick, for what that’s worth.
In brief
Following the death of her father, a female translator (Japanese-American) moves from NYC to The Hague to work at the International Court of Justice. There, the unnamed narrator gets up close and personal (to varying degrees) with a man who is separated from his wife but not yet divorced, the sister of the victim of an apparently random act of urban violence, a deposed African despot on trial for perpetrating atrocities in his home country, and the Dutch lawyer defending him. (Have I left anyone out?) Yada, yada, she eventually works out what she wants from life, which is to get out of The Hague. Other stuff too although as an old, white monolingual antipodean, I prefer not to comment in case I got it wrong.
Writing
This is a language, and to a lesser extent character, driven novel. Ms K’s powerful yet nuanced command of the former rarely flags.
Bottom line
Worth reading for the quality of the prose if for no other reason.