‘Intimacies’ by Katie Kitamura

Fiction – hardcover; Jonathan Cape; 225 pages; 2021.

Can there be a more intimate act than listening to a war criminal’s testimony and then interpreting it — in real-time — in an international courtroom setting?

Such interpreters often deal with sensitive subjects — including violence, death and ethnic cleansing — but must maintain impartiality and communicate what they hear accurately and without emotion.

Or, as the first-person narrator in Katie Kitamura’s extraordinary novel Intimacies says, they must make the “spaces between languages as small as possible”.

[…] interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the 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. […] And yet—as I stared down at the pad of paper in front of me, covered in shorthand—something did seep out. I saw the words I had been saying, for nearly twenty minutes now, cross-border raid, mass grave, armed youth. (pages 116-117)

Set in The Hague

In this compelling story, told in languid first-person prose, the unnamed interpreter accepts a one-year contract at the International Court in The Hague [1] on the North Sea coast of the Netherlands. It’s the perfect opportunity to escape New York City, where she was raised, following the death of her father after a long illness and her mother’s return to Singapore.

Here, in a strange new European city, with a new job, she tries to adjust to a new way of life, aware that her colleagues all seem super confident, even flamboyant, while she’s more introspective and focused on just getting through the year without making any drastic errors.

Asked to interpret for a former president who has been accused of the worst crimes against humanity, she grapples with the emotional challenges of her job. And outside of work, she also grapples with two intertwined issues: her identity and a sense of home.

A tale of contradictions

The story is full of paradoxes. In this calm and peaceful city, the narrator is surprised to discover there’s an undercurrent of violence; the international criminal court, which strives to provide justice for victims regardless of their nationality, is said to have an African bias; and the extreme nature of certain atrocities, such as genocide or war crimes, is in complete contrast to the mundane characteristics of the individuals who commit them.

Any wonder the narrator seeks to build intimate relationships with good people — she needs them for emotional support, companionship and fun. She finds this with Jana, a single Black woman in her forties who is a curator at the Mauritshuis museum, who becomes a close friend.

Her character was the opposite of mine, she was almost compulsively open whereas I had grown guarded in recent years, my father’s illness had served as a quiet warning against too much hope. She entered my life at a moment when I was more than usually susceptible to the promise of intimacy. I felt a cool relief in her garrulous company, and I thought in our differences we achieved a kind of equilibrium. (pages 2-3)

And then there’s her lover, Adriaan, whose “intrinsic ease” with her offers a sense of normalcy, routine and comfort. But while intimate, it’s an ambiguous relationship for Adriaan is married with children (“He had been left by his wife a year earlier”) and for much of the novel he’s in Lisbon, trying to sort things out with his estranged wife, leaving our narrator with a set of keys to his substantially sized apartment because it “would make me happy to imagine you here”.

On the surface, this seems a wholly intimate act, to reside in your lover’s home, surrounded by his things (and his wife’s things), but it soon becomes a chore when Adriaan stops communicating and his one-week trip morphs into an extended period away with no end date in sight.

Quiet and understated

Intimacies is a quietly understated novel about big issues (another paradox!), including morality, crimes against humanity, trauma, justice and the importance of language, especially the way it is interpreted and conveyed.

I loved reading about the intricacies of this line of work, of the pressure to do it against the clock and to do it accurately so that a reliable witness doesn’t appear unreliable and doesn’t affect the “outcome of a trial”.

It’s a stylish novel, full of beautifully crafted sentences, the kind that meander but are deeply personal and contemplative. It’s a beguiling tale, but there’s an undercurrent of suspense, too — will Adriaan ever return, for instance, and will the former president do or say something in the courtroom to unravel her professional demeanour?

I highly recommend adding this one to your list — I’m confident it will be going on my list of favourite reads for 2024!

Thanks to Brona’s at This Reading Life for bringing this extraordinary novel to my attention and to the Festival Mavens (on Instagram), whose concise review confirmed that I really needed to read it.

 

[1] In her acknowledgements, the author writes: “Although the court that appears in this novel does contain certain similarities to the Internationa Criminal Court, it is in no way intended to represent that institution or its activities”