Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books)

Everyone who moves to a new city in another country feels this: “We live in a state of I know but I do not know.” 

Leaving New York after the death of her father when she “no longer knew how to be at home there,” a young woman takes a job as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Equipped with the English and Japanese languages that were the mother tongues of her parents, she learned French as a child in Paris and learned Spanish and German “to the point of professional proficiency.” As an interpreter, her job is to “bridge the chasms between words,” with nuance and intention as important as accuracy and clarity. 

Concealed in a small booth, isolated from “the high theatrics” of the court, she focuses so heavily on interpreting that “language loses its meaning” while she translates words that describe “the unspeakable.”

“More than susceptible to the promise of intimacy” in a city that is “almost strenuously civilized,” she eavesdrops on conversations as she begins to learn Dutch. She makes friends with an American museum curator and starts a relationship with a man with whom she has “an intrinsic ease.”

Then she becomes engulfed in “uncertainty, blooming like mold.” Her American friend becomes obsessed by the lack of safety in her neighborhood after a man is attacked and badly beaten near her doorstep. At a cocktail party, a stranger reveals intimate details of her lover’s past, a marriage with children that is still in place. Soon after that, her nascent relationship takes a lonely twist when the man she’s involved with leaves to ask his wife for a divorce. Within a week he goes silent.

Her job, which has been impersonal, takes on a weird dimension when she’s sent to the Court’s Detention Center, to interpret for a jihadist when he enters the Center. The closeness demanded by this is physical, during which she sits beside the accused man and speaks quietly into his ear. He fosters this by requesting her as an interpreter during meetings with his defense attorneys and she becomes “the only company he could now bear.”

Lines blur. Work loses its anonymity and holds emotional demands. The relationship that had “a deep familiarity superseding our many differences” fades into a void. The social rules of this new community become more baffling when the interpreter begins to meet local residents. She suspects that the “docile surface” of The Hague conceals “a more complex and contradictory nature.” At the same time she begins to understand the damning gulf that lies between morality and legality, and experiences the danger that’s bred when false intimacy is combined with brutal truth.

As in her other novels, Katie Kitamura has created a nameless narrator of unrevealed origins. In Intimacies however, she has given this narrator a plot that is more grounded in detail than the figures in her other novels received. Interpreting the state of loneliness and disorientation with precision and brilliance , Kitamura concludes with her narrator no longer feeling that “equanimity was either tenable or desirable,” a thought that bears the resonance of truth in our uncertain century.~Janet Brown