Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel, Intimacies, is told from the astute and digressive perspective of a court interpreter. The woman in question confronts major changes in her life; her father has died and she has decided to make her way in a city she is unfamiliar with.
Beneath the surface, the American author probes myriad forms of intimacy, including those that are desirable and those that are imposed.
Intimacies was named book of the year by The New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post for 2021. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
The protagonist of the novel is an interpreter, a woman who has moved to The Hague to work at the International Criminal Court. Very little is known about this translator. Her name is never known, nor her exact age, although clues suggest that she is between thirty and forty years old. The only thing that is revealed almost immediately is that she is the only child of an Eastern marriage.
Intimacies has a really interesting first-person narration. Everything is told from the translator’s point of view, everything goes through the filter of her mind.
The book begins in a situation of grief and disorientation. The anonymous narrator has moved from New York to The Hague after the death of her father and her mother’s sudden decision to relocate to Singapore. It can be said that the protagonist of Intimacies is a woman of many languages and identities who longs to belong somewhere.
Newly arrived in The Hague, the protagonist has a temporary contract and settles into a provisional dwelling. She does not really know where the ground beneath her feet is. She does not speak Dutch, nor does she handle the customs; she understands her “displacement” as a sort of personal liberation, as if it were a kind of restart in her life.
Very soon, the strong sense of rootlessness and isolation experienced by the protagonist becomes apparent. She feels like a foreigner in the United States, in Singapore, in the Netherlands. This woman is from everywhere, but she doesn’t end up rooted anywhere.
There is something in this lack of roots that lets us distinguish her existential point of view.
Multilingual, the protagonist works as a translator speaking English and French for those accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. She does not suspect it, but in this context, the interpretive work carries a psychological and ethical burden from which no one truly escapes unscathed.
In the trials that follow, it becomes clear that the protagonist is a “conduit” of language. As a court translator, the narrator has the job of fading intimately into the voices and stories of genocidal, oppressive and other contemporary villains.
In her words, “it was the job of the interpreter not simply to state or perform but to repeat the unspeakable.”
It is worth noting that, all too often, interpretation is seen as a passive and linear process. But throughout the pages of this novel, another reality is exposed. The American author explores some of the complexities faced by court interpreters, such as the ambiguity of language, the risks of miscommunication, and the dilemmas of morality.
“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,” Kitamura’s narrator reflects.
In Intimacies, translation is portrayed as a winding and challenging journey. Kitamura makes it evident that the translator is marked by the text and in turn leaves a mark on it by decoding and externalizing it.
Eventually, the interpreter ends up assigned to a brutal war crimes case involving a former dictator of a West African country. Everything gets complicated when the woman begins to develop a kind of relationship with the accused. As she acquires the man’s voice, she can’t help but feel a certain proximity.
“Over the course of those long hours in the booth, 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,” says the translator in a revealing passage.
In a way, the trial of the former president forces the narrator to confront a kind of moral ambivalence about her work at the International Criminal Court. Being the voice of the accused, the woman experiences a layer of intimacy with him. Almost immediately, this strange form of connection becomes a delicate point of no return.
The protagonist, both attracted to and repelled by the former president, begins to confuse and crack.
At the beginning of the book, the translator considers herself to be a fairly neutral “instrument” in her craft. However, as the story progresses, the narrator begins to understand that in the act of interpretation there is a kind of projection of her own subjectivity, and that her words are also laden with presuppositions and biases.
Kitamura’s work insists on evaluating how the meaning of messages is created and how the nature of the original discourse is jeopardized. In a sense, this novel is about the power of language and the labyrinths hidden in the act of interpretation.
Outside of work, the woman establishes a romantic relationship with Adriaan, a married father who is about to get divorced. However, shortly after the pairing, he goes to Portugal to settle unfinished business with his wife. Adriaan disappears without explanation.
This novel is about the power of language and the labyrinths hidden in the act of interpretation
The silence of her romantic partner causes her hope of a romance to fade away. At this point, the protagonist does not know whether Adriann has left to rekindle his marriage or to finalize the divorce. The narrator is left in a state of limbo, which worsens the sense of rootlessness and loneliness she has been carrying since the beginning of the story.
“I thought – I want to go home. I want to be in a place that feels like home. Where that was, I did not know,” states the translator with a heavy heart; faced with the cracks in her professional and personal life, the woman will have no choice but to seriously question her identity and future.
In the midst of the trial of the former head of state and a love affair that seems doomed to fail, Kitamura’s mysterious translator must finally set the record straight.
Intimacies is a novel about a middle-aged woman who still doesn’t belong anywhere. In this regard, Katie Kitamura says she wanted to write a book about dislocation, but also about the experience of being able to put down roots and settle down.
This is a piercing and intense work that explores uprootedness, the dislocation of the self, the enigmas of language, the bonds of integration and the search for intimacy, written with a hypnotic expressive delicacy.
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