The setting makes this story almost more interesting than the plot. An unnamed interpreter has arrived at The Hague after the death of her father. She begins to settle in as an interpreter; then meets a handsome man, Andriaan who is married but estranged from his wife. She makes a friend of Jana, who recently witnessed a severe mugging outside her apartment.

In the midst of what seems to be a quiet affair with Adriaan, he decides to go to Lisbon to ask for a divorce from his wife. She moves into his apartment. Her friendship leads to making an acquaintance with the sister of the man who was mugged. Her work at The Hague International court brings her in contact with a notorious president of an African country accused of genocide. His presence is chilling as is that of his attorney, a friend of Adriaan's.

This is the story of a various types of intimacies - sexual, professional, language, friendship, etc. Good writing but I was a bit disappointed with the ending. There is no use of quotation marks and very little punctuation. ( )

A short, sleek novel about a rootless interpreter in The Hague. ( )

I expected more to happen in this book. Which is my fault, not the book’s. Which is the marketing’s fault actually—psychological thriller? Not really.

It’s a smart book about how much we can know about one another, about how much we can connect to one another, the lies we tell ourselves and others in order to connect and in order to remain apart, free. The book’s intelligence comes from the juxtaposition of the MC’s love life and her professional life as a translator for crimes against humanity legal proceedings at The Hague. Her empathy gets all scrambled in her work …and maybe in her love life. Women in particular are wired to connect, to relate deeply…and it can make the world confusing and dangerous.

So smart. A smart book. But the relationship at the heart of the novel is boring? And even though she knows she’s pathetic, she’s still pathetic?

No. That’s not it. I have no beef with women who knowingly make bad romantic choices…I just don’t really like the main character. She’s dull. That’s the thing. That’s the thing. Smart book, dull MC.

The NYT review says, “ Though the words “emotional labor,” “feminism” and “colonialism” never appear, it is still deeply engaged with these grand social issues, while it also makes subtle comments on everything from art to jealousy to gentrification.” And it’s true.

This is a smart book. I don’t think the novel agrees with the MC’s choice at the end. I don’t think it disagrees. I think the novel is wise: given our wiring to attach and connect and bond in a dangerous world, we do the best we can.

I just wish the MC had a little more zest. ( )

[b:Intimacies|55918474|Intimacies|Katie Kitamura|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1605570704l/55918474._SX50_.jpg|87129689] is narrated by an interpreter working in the Court at The Hague. She tells us more of the back stories of her friends and lover than her somewhat mysterious self and the "strange intimacy" of her encounter with the accused former president of an unnamed African country in his cell or in the conference room with his lawyers. She translates from the French not his native Arabic, but he "sees" her in a way that frightens her as she ponders the power of language.
Another compelling thread of the book is her lover, Adriaan, who leaves her alone in his apartment for weeks while he goes to resolve his divorce with his wife in Lisbon. When will he return, or will he? Troubled by the adulterous affair of her friend Eline's bookseller brother who she espies in a restaurant, our unnamed heroine is uncertain of her own affair. She also questions her affinities with other people recently met in her move to Holland.
The book is well written in spare language and readable in short eventful chapters. I gobbled it up even though not entirely at ease with the ending.
Read Ron Charles review: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/katie-kitamura-intimacies-boo... ( )

I like that Kitamura seems to tell us how to interpret this novel in the title she gives it. Granted, it’s not an always foolproof measure (the first blurb on the back of the hardcover states confidently that it is “a novel about the ruthlessness of power…”, which, no its not) but I think here it accurately lets the reader know that the novelist’s primary concern in the work is to do with intimacy and intimacies.

When you think of “intimacy” a relationship with physical geography probably isn’t what first springs to mind, though given how basic and integral the idea of “home” is to identity for many of us, I can see it being a base for other intimacies. The novel begins with this intimacy - our narrator has left New York, where her immigrant family had lived and which she lacked a connection with - and moved to The Hague, where she wonders “if I could be more than a visitor here.” Unaware of it, a late reveal shows that she has an early and intimate connection with the city, which subconsciously may have helped direct her there, early roots producing a shoot.

Interpersonal intimacies are presented in varying forms. Friendship and romantic love, of course, are craved by almost all of us, including the narrator. These pass by mostly uninterestingly in my reading here. Sometimes you accidentally become party to a stranger’s as you go about town on your own business: “On occasion, I found myself stumbling into situations more intimate than I would have liked…”

More interesting is the presentation of intentionally forced intimacy. A strong passage in the novel relates to Judith Leyster’s 1631 painting “Man Offering Money to a Young Woman”, in which there are two figures in a candlelit room, a man leaning down over a seated woman who is working on a handicraft and staring straight down, while he holds out money in one hand and pulls on her with the other. The intimate closeness he forces on her is most unwelcome. In parallel there is a man whose attentions towards the narrator are also trying to force an unwanted intimacy, and who has financial power over her.

Then most interestingly there is conflicted intimacy, compromising intimacy, that our narrator is led into through her work. Shades of grey are always the most interesting, eh? Working as a translator at the International Criminal Court she provides undoubtedly necessary and useful services in translating court and lawyer’s proceedings for defendants charged with murder on a statecraft scale. But by necessity providing services for one person brings you into a sort of intimate relationship with them. You are there for that one person’s benefit. Speaking to them. Even whispering quietly into their ear while seated next to them.

About halfway into the novel (unfortunately not sooner!) this mostly comes into play when the narrator becomes interpreter for an ex-President of an African nation charged with atrocities committed while trying to hang onto power:

I was close enough to observe the texture of his skin, the particularities of his features, I could smell the scent of the soap he must have used that morning.
[…]
I sometimes had the unpleasant sensation that of all the people in the room below, of all the people in the city itself, the former president was the person I knew best. In those moments, out of what I can only describe as an excess of imagination, he became the person whose perspective I occupied. I flinched when the proceedings seemed to go against him. I felt quiet relief when they moved in his direction. It was disquieting in the extreme, like being placed inside a body I had no desire to occupy. I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable.

“I was repulsed to find myself so permeable.” It’s a fascinating insight. How solid are our own selves, and how much altered could they be by the intimacies we inhabit, voluntarily or not, positive or not. I only wish the novel had spent much more time on this question, and cut out other parts of the novel, unmentioned here, that I don’t feel contribute much to it. ( )