INTIMACIES
by Katie Kitamura

Cover Summary
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 explosive political fires: her work interpreting for a former president accused of war crimes becomes precarious as their relationship is unbound by shifting language and meaning.
Reading Intimacies
This was a very fast read as it’s only about 240 pages long, and the language itself is made of run on sentences that quickens the pace of reading as well. It took me around two evenings to finish it with little effort.
I wasn’t familiar with the writer before picking up Intimacies, but I do remember I was at the airport waiting for a flight at some point, and snapped a photo of it from the depatures lounge bookstore because I liked the minimal bold cover, and I also tend to really like books by Asian female authors, like Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko.

What I liked
A real person narrator
This book brings together many stories all going on at once in the narrator’s life; on the one hand, she is a foreigner just newly moved to The Hague, with a job that’s incomprehensible to most of us and brings with is a lot of responsibilities. She’s also just met a new man with a complicated history, who she doesn’t mistrust but picks up where things aren’t right. She’s also in the process of assessing and making new friends, figuring out relations and a new culture.
I really liked that we didn’t linger too much on one aspect and moved swiftly across the different aspects of her life, which is something we can very much relate to. We usually don’t spend all our day thinking about work or someone we love, but our thoughts follow the pattern of our day, and they did here too.
The narrator is a quiet, intelligent woman and it quickly transpires how observant and quick she is in making decisions about people’s true intentions, whether they are lying or being genuine, and assessing their body language in relation to the words they speak. I think we’d get along if we ever met.
“She entered my life at a moment where I was more than usually susceptible to the promise of intimacy.”
What I wasn’t so keen on
The run-on sentences
Even though at some points I got used to the writing, I am not a fan of having a comma where a fullstop should be, and this kind of writing threw me off from the beginning. She also does not use direct speech but rather puts the questions and quotes as part of the narrator’s sequence of conscious, which left me a little lost sometimes.
Emotionlessness
The mood of the novel matches the cold landscape it is set in, with its imposing stone walls and official buildings. All throughout, there was the feeling of just numb acceptance of events and even in a couple of scenes where the narrator felt truly angry, this was delivered with an eerie sort of emotionlessness that felt a little bleak.
This especially rang true when compared to the cover summary, where she is described as getting “obsessed” and “drawn into simmering personal dramas.” There was little to no drama in the entire book.
The Characters
Literally all of them. I only kind of liked the narrator.

All in all…

I have really mixed feelings about this book, but I can’t say that I actually enjoyed it. It was a little too cold and emotionless for me and I didn’t vibe with the storytelling.
Maybe I had different expectations, because my usual experience with female Asian writers includes pulling up a lot of depth, heartbreaking undiluted emotion and deep complex relations that I get consumed with. Intimacies just didn’t do that for me, and I will probably give this writer’s other works a miss based on that.