Review: 'Intimacies'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Intimacies
By Katie Kitamura
Literary Fiction
Riverhead Books

The connections we make with other people are based to some extent on what we know about them, which is guided in part by what they show us. The levels of complexity and ambiguity in what we see, if what we see is what is really being shown, and what we make of it can add up to a long-lasting connection or a severed one.

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura chronicles these connections for a court interpreter in The Hague. The unnamed narrator is drifting after her father dies, her mother moves back to Singapore and New York no longer feels like home. At The Hague, she slowly makes a friendship, has congenial thoughts about her colleagues and meets a man. At an arts event, early in their relationship, a man who knows him tells her Adriaan is married and tries to both come between the new couple and claim her. It doesn't work, but the interplay between the three of them is fiercely emotional and yet quietly calm and civilized at the same time.

That tone, and the delicate balance between the surface of civility and the underlying deep emotions, is a hallmark of this short, highly admired novel (it made President Obama's list of favorite books as well as listed for the National Book Award).

Our narrator's work as an interpreter, and her understanding of that role, underpin the interplay between all the characters, especially as she tries to interpret what people are showing her and telling her. In her work, "there were great chasms between words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning."

It's not just words; it's also actions that can be observed but perhaps not clearly or from the wrong angle, as when our interpreter sees three men slowing making their way down the street in an odd fashion. She realizes two of them are picking up cigarette butts dropped all over the streets of what appears at first to be a clean city, while the third follows them vacuuming up the small bits of trash. 

The author shows how what we interpret what we see in other aspects of life. The interpreter's friend introduces her to another friend. This new woman is the sister of a man who was viciously mugged near the first friend's apartment. This man, and what the interpreter sees him doing, are open to more than one meaning, until the truth settles in.

The interpreter also is assigned to the trial of a would-be dictator who is responsible for the murders of many people in his country. Of course the dictator's demeanor is never that of an evil monster, and that ambiguity about what people are capable of while appearing as something else is striking. Complicating the interpreter's work is the new lead defense attorney, who is the man that attacked her lover and tried to put the moves on her at the arts event. His actions are at times bizarre, and there is little ambiguity about his character. 

The attorney is a bit like the man in a real painting that is described in some detail as the interpreter views it during another art show. Judith Leyster's "Man Offering Money to a Young Woman" is a dual painting from the mid-1600s, painted by a woman in her 20s. The man is hovering over a woman working on a hand-sewing project. His look can be seen as either arduous, according to the author, or conceited. The woman looks fearful. The money in his hand isn't apparent at first, but it's there. He's treating her like an object of commerce. The other title of the painting is "The Proposition".

The painting operated around a schism, it represented two irreconciable positions: the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardor and seduction, and the woman, who had been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation.

More than one man in Intimacies uses women as objects of desire, of acquisition, as beings not even important enough to assassinate. Not all the women are sincere in what they are pursuing, and why, either. This is depicted more as an observation of the breadth and depth of human nature, rather than a judgment that some people are mostly good and some are mostly not. It's also an observation on our world, as seen while riding on a bus past The Hague's secure jail:

But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in -- this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.

When the trial comes to an end after months, the interpreter notes that reporters who covered the opening and stayed away until the end will use pieces to form a narrative:

They had mere fragments of the narrative, and yet they would assemble those fragments into a story like any other story, a story with the appearance of unity.

This is exactly what the interpreter is doing as she observes the people she interacts with. It is dispassionately written, much as the author notes an interpreter or translator works, in that the person doing this work is trying to stay removed while accurately conveying what is being communicated.

Making conclusions early in the novel before revelations don't pay off. This is especially true of the ending. It was an unexpected ending and one that was joyous to behold. "Only connect" indeed.