The author of A Separation returns with a novel about a translator who finds work at The Hague's International Criminal Court. A New York transplant who speaks many languages and holds identities, she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she's asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes—all while confronting her own personal battles with love and power.
...intense, unsettling ... Intimacies is very much a story that seems to be something familiar but soon morphs into something disorientingly strange ... The incongruity between [the narrator's] domestic life and professional life is what makes Intimacies so fascinating ... Through parts of this story, Kitamura is exploring impossibly remote territory ... Her narrator’s experiences in the translation box raise some of the same questions as Edna O’Brien’s novel The Little Red Chairs ... But with her Jamesian attention to the slightest movement of bodies and words, Kitamura keeps Intimacies rooted to the ordinary domestic experiences of her narrator, her petty jealousies, her passing suspicions. The effect is a kind of emotional intensity that’s gripping because it feels increasingly unsustainable.
... coolly written and casts a spell. The light it emits is ghostly, like that from under the lid of a Xerox machine ... The narrator’s voice is largely bloodless. One of Kitamura’s gifts, though, is to inject every scene with a pinprick of dread. Your animal instincts as a reader — the tingling of the skin, the eagerness to pick the book back up — may be engaged before the rest of you is ... Kitamura pays attention to the dark side of urban landscapes, the things we prefer not to learn about ... All novels are, in a sense, about language, but Intimacies presses down on how meaning is made, and how it is compromised ... the real heat here, as in Kitamura’s previous novel, A Separation (2017), lies in the author’s abiding interest in the subtleties of human power dynamics ... Few novelists write so astringently about how we misread people, and are forced to refresh, as if on a web browser, our assumptions about them ... I like Intimacies — it’s certainly one of the best novels I’ve read in 2021 — without it quite being the sort of thing I like. The rapt attention it pays to the problems of glamorous, international, well-appointed people, not to go all Tea Party on the readers of this review, poked whatever class antagonisms I cling to ... You don’t sense the grit and grain of life. No one has ill-timed acne, or really can’t catch a cab. There are not many stray, stabbing insights. A film version would feature a lot of long, somber, pre-dawn drone shots of the stylish urban landscape and a thrumming score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross ... Kitamura has delivered a taut, moody novel that moves purposefully between worlds.
There is something decidedly unintimate about calling a novel Intimacies. The refusal to specify (what, whose) feels like a hedge. And yet Intimacies, by the author Katie Kitamura, achieves a kind of truth in advertising. Kitamura pursues various definitions of the word: knowledge of, closeness with, closeness to ... The result is a rich, novelistic portrait of an abstraction ... The woman’s affect is also the novel’s: haunted, unstable, and intermittently hopeful ... Intimacies is not a shallow novel, but it is, finally, a deep and layered novel about superficiality ... But the implications of the moment run deeper: in exposing the pneumatics of charm, Kitamura insists that there are motivations behind it.
