Katie Kitamura’s A Separation should be added to the list of superb novels of romantic endings ... Kitamura, like Ferrante and Cusk, is interested in writerly passivity, in how the self-effacement called forth by the writer’s craft might complicate the writer’s life, especially the female writer’s life ... A Separation displays Kitamura’s stylistic control once again. The writing is lucid, cool, often muted, less prone to sentence fragments than Gone to the Forest was, more likely to bring simple clauses together into longer, rhythmic sentences. And Kitamura again creates an atmosphere of dreadful expectation ... Violence of all kinds, not just against other bodies but against other minds, remains Kitamura’s quarry. A Separation proves that few stalk such game more patiently or more powerfully.
Kitamura is a writer with a visionary, visual imagination—she’s an art critic, too—and a bold symbolist streak. The mood she likes best is menace ... In A Separation, Kitamura has made consciousness her territory. The book is all mind, and an observant, taut, astringent mind it is, though there is something almost unhinged about so much rationality in the face of such duress ... As is so often the case in adultery-themed novels, there is a strong echo here of Anna Karenina, but, unusually, it is Alexei Karenin, not Anna, whom our narrator resembles ... The equation of emotionality with female weakness pervades Kitamura’s novel. It is the narrator’s obsession, a fate to avoid above all else ... Absence is the novel’s great motif, the subject of its ruminative investigation. The word is used so often that it becomes a kind of totem. On page after page, we hear that Christopher was all surface, no substance, a vain, vanished man ... These are stirring questions, pointing toward a deep, buried sorrow and regret, and yet the novel itself seems as repulsed by such emotions as its narrator is.
...[an] exquisitely wrought if occasionally static novel ... Kitamura skillfully draws the cast and setting, creating a Hitchcockian mood among the bright colors and bleached sunlight of the Mediterranean ... [Kitamura] takes her place among a set of women authors who explore ambivalence about marriage through their female characters. There’s a classical feel to these explorations, a need to revisit — to reinvent — the old stories.
Kitamura’s story isn’t so concerned with whodunit. Instead, her narrator reflects on her relationship with Christopher, on his tics and charming habits, and on how to mourn the possible loss of someone she’s already drifted apart from ... Much of the book, then, involves a woman trying to imagine the inner life of a man she’s fallen out of love with, trying to re-inhabit his thoughts in order to find him ... Kitamura gives us a book that’s worth reading for its inventive cadences alone. And there’s more to it than that: surprising turns and honest thoughts on the complexity of loss.
In a novel powered primarily by voice, stylistic choices are key, and that includes punctuation. Kitamura’s relentless joining of complete sentences with commas is grating, giving the text the look of weak secondary-school essays ... The trying punctuation is frustrating because the voice is otherwise strong — distinctive, inviting while also remote, expressive of an emotional limbo ... The narrator’s investigations in Greece become a process of unknowing her husband. Unfortunately, Christopher remains unknowable to the reader as well ... The plot takes one finely executed, unanticipated turn. Thereafter, however, the energy dissipates. This main event occurs too early in the novel to constitute a climax, so we’re left with a sense that something else needs to happen. It doesn’t ... The novel closes with the sense that all along we have been reading a somewhat smaller story than we thought. Kitamura strikes a haunting note, even a memorable chord, but she doesn’t play a song.
There is one decisive moment that strikes like a sudden blow to the head — the moment when we discover where Christopher is. Not much else happens in A Separation, but the rest of the novel is taut with quiet suspense. Like the burnt landscape, it is barren, always a 'whiff of char in the air.' It is wonderful to read a book that respects its readers in this way; Kitamura allows our imaginations to do much of the work ... The narrator, it seems, would be almost embarrassed writing lush or gorgeous prose — instead, her sentences are awkward and anemic, with the unlikely beauty of a lunar landscape. A Separation does not leave us with any of those satisfying nuggets of wisdom or emotional climax we sometimes pan books for. Instead, it left me with an indistinct but unshakeable mood, a sense of being at sea with the knowledge that the shoreline isn't quite where I thought it was, and the currents are strong.
The narrator spends listless days at the hotel, which Kitamura depicts in vivid set pieces that convey a mounting sense of doom...and [she] sets the story in a forbidding town, where impending violence is felt in the air … The narrator seems apathetic, but there is something subversive in the sullen way she fulfills her duties: stranded in a lie Christopher insisted on, she frees herself with quiet sabotage. When the police enter the picture, she doesn’t share information that might untangle what happened to Christopher. Her unwillingness to cooperate is another sly act of refusal … A Separation sneakily conveys the way women are trained to contain themselves and cater to men’s aspirations and whims, while also cleaning up after their bad deeds … Kitamura sees this clearly, and her observations are appropriately acidic, subtly exposing the punishing demand that women be both utterly passive and utterly in control.
A Separation is a different kind of beast. Structurally, it is a book of two halves — the queasy run-up to a tragedy, and the fraught aftermath. Both sections are stylistically ambitious and psychologically rich, as Kitamura eschews pace and puzzles for measured and rigorous inquiry into human motivations and desires ... A Separation is a work of great intensity and originality. Kitamura’s Greek setting is off the tourist track, all empty hotels, vandalized churches and wildfire-ravaged landscape. There are deft meditations on the art of translation and the ritual of mourning, and sharp insight into what binds and divides lovers. All is conveyed in strangely long yet lilting sentences. This is the book that elevates Kitamura to a different league.
...a kind of postmodern mystery in which we end up with a dead body, evidence of a violent crime, an abundant trail of clues and even angry mourners, yet nobody feels compelled to pursue the investigation ... Lots of things in A Separation are just ciphers for other infractions, other codes that the novel’s 'outsiders' — its narrator included — have unwittingly violated. In the hierarchical world of Kitamura’s novel, there is little love or friendship between equals, only manipulation and control, guilt and obedience, humiliation and submission. And behind these power games, one detects an overriding fatalism about the possibility of human connection ... It is this radical disbelief — a disbelief, it appears, even in the power of art — that makes Kitamura’s accomplished novel such a coolly unsettling work.
Portents of doom lurk on nearly every page of this novel ... A Separation circles in and around itself, in style as well as in plot; clauses upon clauses merge in lengthy sentences strung together by commas. No quotation marks are used in accounts of conversations, a practice that seems disconcerting at first. The prose flows forward, and the author’s sense of direction is sure; there is a point to every observation ... But there is much more than the Christopher mystery to this taut little novel with its disquieting observations about secrets, lies, and the ways in which we all are impenetrable to each other.
In 229 pages, with a small cast and spare narration, author Katie Kitamura explores the psychological landscape of a woman in a liminal space: no longer the dutiful wife but still performing the outward roles of one, in a situation where the alarm bells should be ringing but instead a wearied resignation has taken hold ... this is the central concern of Kitamura’s compelling, if often coldly elusive and claustrophobic, novel: the division between performed roles and our private identities, and at what point these performances consume the lives we should be living.
When the emotional truths begin to unveil themselves—and they eventually do, with the quiet intensity of a tornado’s eye—it’s startling, as though the clear-eyed analysis and deeply felt honesty of the prose snuck in the back door, and only retroactively made itself known. This is a book of understated revelations, full of stark language that nonetheless demurs at every opportunity to make a bold gesture or proclaim a more risky perspective ... As the question of Christopher’s whereabouts starts to take on an air of worry, she begins to peel back the layers of their claustrophobic existence, though always one step removed, as though she were having an out-of-body experience looking back on her life. And that’s the real power of Kitamura’s writing: Her protagonist is less an unreliable narrator than unwilling one ... The buried grief and emotional distance that first seem so off-putting are what ends up lending A Separation its haunting force.
This alienation is very much of the literary moment. As the narrator wanders musingly around the portent-stuffed resort, you sometimes wonder if she is a pastiche of Lydia Davis taking a nasty holiday in a Deborah Levy novel. But it makes her miserable, unable to get on with her relationship with her new man, Yvan, who is by some distance the warmest and most natural character in the book. It also makes her a useless detective. In Greece, she can’t bear to ask direct questions, and even when a murder plot worthy of Inspector Montalbano lays itself out plainly before her ... In the end, Kitamura’s protagonist is a smart, accomplished, contemporary version of that ancient literary figure, the unreliable narrator ... A Separation leaves you intrigued, impressed, but also artfully irritated.
[Kitamura] chooses to engage the themes in A Separation precisely because they are at the heart of the idea of the literary novel; she approaches them with full knowledge of both their weight and their diminishing relevance ... By pairing these two genres, Kitamura demonstrates that love is itself an investigation, an attempt to get to answers of another human individual as though they were a crime scene. When we are betrayed, when love breaks apart, we all become amateur Sherlock Holmeses, seeking out meaning in every gesture and detail, seizing on any crumb of information as a clue to what we have lost ... Kitamura’s novel examines the uselessness of this plot, of marriage as a failed form of translation. The ultimate subject here is futility. Not the futility of marriage as an enterprise—we know that already—but the futility of its narrative examination. At the end of this detective novel, the detective leaves us with no answers at all.
A Separation cannot escape comparison to another novel about a woman emerging from a broken marriage, Rachel Cusk’s Outline. Both are set in Greece, employ divorce plots, and are narrated by smart, sharply observant woman who take great care not to reveal themselves as they observe with an eloquent yet clinical precision the people and the world around them. Both authors sum up the absurdities and paradoxes of modern life in incisive, powerful prose. But whereas the integrity of Cusk’s narrator is never in doubt, Kitamura’s encourages the reader’s suspicion. It’s a brilliant manipulation as the reader’s evolving relationship with the narrator mirrors the increasing alienation and suspicion of a troubled marriage.
A Separation incorporates some tropes of a mystery novel — including a murder, a femme fatale, and an amateur sleuth hero — but it also relentlessly eschews the conventions of that genre. The only thing more mysterious than an unsolved murder, A Separation suggests, are the inner workings of a marriage ... The narrator bears a literary kinship to Meursault from Camus' The Stranger. Although she never commits a crime like Meursault, her reactions to events that would incite most people to raging emotions are similarly detached ... Kitamura writes with quiet power, and although the loose plot ends might not satisfy some mystery buffs, her astute psychological analyses will give all readers much to chew on.
...[a] slow-burn psychological novel, which rakes the embers of betrayal to find grief smoldering underneath ... It is an absorbing tale, marred only by Kitamura’s over-fondness for commas where other punctuation might do — a preference that fosters a fluid forward motion but can be an obstacle to meaning, too.
A Separation functions as a quiet, literary kind of horror novel, told with lyrical prose and minutely-observed commentary about the fear found in failing marriages and the monsters who occasionally exists within these pairings. A Separation is cleverly deceptive, and it possesses a strange, unsettling tone. Kitamura writes with an eeriness that is hard to shake ... A Separation is largely void of any voice except the one that carries it, and it’s a richer novel because of it. Reading of the narrator’s intricacies and personal lamentations creates a rich, intimate story that is addictively engrossing.
...such cool detachment employed in a story about a broken marriage has a curious effect. It's counterintuitive and unsettling, but also surprisingly apt, as the story swirls with secrecy and sublimation ... The novel coyly suggests that this inability to 'move on' may be a uniquely female problem. Though her tone is unswervingly calm and collected, the narrator's thoughts nevertheless reveal a quiet panic that stems from frequent eruptions of guilt. There is her anxiety about having 'moved on' too quickly ... I am haunted by the ending of Kitamura's novel, just as I am haunted by the final image of Elena in the Neapolitan novels, Elena who sits alone in her elegant house on the hill, writing of the vicissitudes of love.
A Separation is fraught with sleights and nods. It seems simple, yet throughout the book, Kitamura adds gossamer layers and funhouse mirrors which yield haunting echoes, demanding rereading ... Perhaps itself a lie, or a slip into professional mourning, or perhaps the invisibility of slipping into something already decided, A Separation is a gorgeous treatise of feasibilities and trajectories, of guise and finally of narrative, invention.
