Intimacies

that one scene where she describes a woman’s testimony going through two layers of translation (dyula—>french—>english) and switches povs at will. so good at writing translation.

"I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness" Intimacies is a quiet and thoughtful look into the shifting, and often subjective context of our lives, our sense of selves, and our biased understanding of the world around us. It's a short, engaging read, despite the fact that it doesn't really have any overarching plot. We spend most of the novel with our unnamed narrator, as she navigates her new position as interpreter at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and her new life in this new, unfamiliar city. Intimacies is mostly comprised of these reflections on the narrator's part on the role of her job, her workplace, the mutable nature of her relationships with the few people she knows in this city. The thought was disquieting - that our identities should be so mutable, and therefore the course of our lives Overall, it's a strange novel, but very engaging and really nicely well-crafted. I felt like I was watching a matrioska unfold, whenever the narrator would present us with another new meaning, another context to the world she inhabited. There is especially a scene when she is at an exhibition at the Mauritshuis, where she admires Judith Leyster's "Man Offering Money to a Young Woman", that was so well-done, I felt like I could envision the painting myself, despite not having seen it before. As the narrator learns new things about the painting, it seems to grow both on page and in the reader's imagination, gaining new meaning. Really beautifully done.

It's okay.

i had a good time with this... i think! i might even hold love for it, though i also know it’s not a love that finds its root in the characters & places that populate the novel so much as the pervading atmosphere and questions it forms around them. it’s disquieting to weigh my feelings here in 2024, especially when i don’t have to dig far to grasp the depth of my own disillusionment and distaste of the hague. the united nations has never been more overtly useless than against the backdrop of the continuously escalating genocide in gaza, and i wonder if i would have been more swept away by the ephemeral beauty and romance that thrums under the more fascinating & intricate parts of this novel if not for the more present, more violent reality i had to live in.

there is still a lot here to chew on, and it’s the very fact that the un was created as an ostensible meeting point for peacekeeping & diplomatic dialogue that allows for the central conceit of intimacies to concern itself only with language, translation, and the role of the interpreter in a system that purports to champion international justice. in an era, however, where neither diplomacy nor dialogue are necessitated even as a pretense, and despite the complexity and eloquence of the writing, this just came across as an unexpectedly naive, ill-aged examination of morality, perception & the isolation of the unanchored—even as i feel and believe that this is the exact opposite of what the novel was when it was published only three years ago. it isn’t entirely its fault that the nuances it does capture fall short of the reality we currently live in, but it doesn’t make those tatters in the fabric of its arguments any less conspicuous.

it’s nice nonetheless to read a contemporary writer with such a salient, unapologetic style. intimacies could have been about anything and i likely would have stuck with it for katie kitamura’s authorial instincts and voice. i love her unique rhythm, her odd choices in punctuation, her eye for these gorgeous sequences that you can only convey through mastery of dialogue pacing: the painting at jana’s exhibition as a kind of emotional checkpoint for the story; the graceful flow of the witness testimony interpretation scene, how the pronouns and words blurred together until they were indistinct; the final exchange with the former president, which made everything i found lacklustre about the denouement marginally worth it. 

this wasn’t a cold novel, yet it was cool to the touch all the same. there’s something sterile about its dignity, its psychologizing, its character sketching, even the moral compass it weighs the story upon, but maybe ultimately to its benefit. i’m not sure. it’s like if stainless steel was a novel’s overarching mood. you can’t fault it for snapping in half against diamond, but you do have to wonder why you expected anything else from a dollar store knife. this won’t be my last read from kitamura, at least.

methinks i have found another soul-book

ik i rate literally everything 4 stars but i actually really liked this one! kitamura’s prose is so elegant and fluid, even with the intentional running sentences. there was so much wrapped up in this small book — thoughts and conversations about criminal justice, art, the dynamics of relationships, gentrification, etc. it was just a snapshot of a complex life, but i feel as if i was given a very generous window into it.

This was a good book. I liked the focus on language, body language and interpretation. However it didn't blow me away and I found that trials (even fictional ones) about genocide and crimes against humanity isn't a trope I like reading about - so ⭐⭐⭐

felt like watching one of those movies where you’re into it the whole time n then you finish and are like… wait what even happened

Primeiro livro que leio de Katie Kitamura, uma autora americana que tem vindo a gerar grandes expectativas e de quem fiquei a gostar. "Intimacies" dá conta disso mesmo, intimidades, as de um conjunto de personagens que habitam uma cidade europeia com os quais a protagonista se vai envolvendo e desvelando para nosso deleite. Uma mulher chega à cidade holandesa de Haia para um contrato de um ano como intérprete do Tribunal Penal Internacional. Não conhecendo aí ninguém, leva-nos ao encontro de vários personagens — pseudo-namorado, colegas de trabalho, chefes e novas amigas. O mote assenta na diferenciação entre o que parece e o que é, a imagem e o significado, algo que é reforçado por um julgamento de um genocida a quem ela tem de servir de intérprete, dando por si a traduzir as palavras das suas vítimas, vendo-as através dos olhos deste. O texto é simples, mas incisivo, revelador e feminino, pleno de consciência das normas éticas e das expectativas que geram. O que o torna interessante é exatamente o modo como mergulha no subtexto das relações humanas e nos dá a sentir as mesmas. Ainda assim, senti que algo mais poderia ter sido oferecido, porque acaba sendo curto, não conseguindo criar suficiente lastro para se tornar significativo. Gostei de ler, senti-me envolvido, aprendi com o microscópio humano criado pela autora, faltou-me apenas o fechamento, não no sentido do enredo, mas da mensagem da autora.

Decided to go for it based on Obama's Summer Reading List. Reviews spoke about the great tension among revelations of power. That's a bit misleading. There's a really nice nuanced view of the way that power, economics, and gender impact the way we view the world and the "truth" as we perceive it. Even from my perch, I found this book to capture a bit of the chaos that you feel when wedged between situations or people. If you look to the text for the surface level content, you're likely to be left wanting. If you are happy with something a bit more cerebral that might scratch on some of the anxieties that we feel regarding home, family, and sense of self, it can be a really nice and quick read.

Kitamura really said "hey do you want to see how forming intimate relationships with others chips away at your sense of self until you can understand others better than yourself" and I said Sure! I'm totally in a good mental state to process that!

This was really effective at raising a bunch of questions about Justice and fall ability being at the heart of the human condition, with societal conditioning either encouraging discourse around it or stymying, often with shame. It felt very macro to me; despite being granular with interactions and very personal and insular. It’s consistently interesting but never something I completely connected with, perhaps because there didn’t feel like any meaningful stakes. Everything abstract.

I liked it a lot. These intensely relationship focused books that aren't really romances are my jam, apparently. I think that the aspects that really drew me in were the interpretations of friendship and how the interpreters had to deal with the emotional testimonies they translate. What dragged it down was the weird, happenstance side plot of this guy being attacked and how it was melded with the main plot. It felt pretty forced and kind of annoying. I would have rather it be more natural. Overall a good read, glad to have read it.

i'm a nerd and i love courtroom scenes (4.5/5)