‘Intimacies’ a coolly written novel about translation and power
Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel, “Intimacies,” is coolly written and casts a spell. The light it emits is ghostly, like that from under the lid of a Xerox machine. It’s about an unnamed woman — youngish, single — who goes to work as an interpreter at an international court at The Hague. She’s in flight from New York, where her father recently died. Like nearly everyone in this novel, she leads a globalized, deracinated life. (Her mother is in Singapore.) There are a lot of visas in her passport. She’s from everywhere and nowhere.
“The Hague bore a family resemblance to the European cities in which I had spent long stretches of my life,” she reports, with the equipoise of one of Joan Didion’s narrators, “and perhaps for this reason I was surprised by how easily and frequently I lost my bearings.”
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.
The dread kicks in early, when the brother of a friend, who owns a bookstore, is beaten in a seemingly senseless act of street violence. It’s maintained by the circumstances of the narrator’s new relationship, with a man who’s separated from his wife but still married. He sometimes ghosts her, in the modern sense of that word.
Not a lot is happening but, as they say on airplanes, oxygen is flowing even though the bag may not appear to inflate.
A skein of dread whorls around the narrator’s job at The Hague. She interprets for, and thus climbs inside the heads of, notorious criminals. A wellknown jihadi glares at her as she works, as if she were responsible for the hell he’s in.
The narrator is assigned to the trial of a former West African president, an unrepentant devotee of what is euphemistically called ethnic cleansing. To her surprise, he starts to like her. He’s charismatic. There’s a perverse distinction, a sick sort of thrill, in being his favorite.
The narrator is a critic of the court, though she largely admires its work. The defendants tend to be Black; no one is dragging Henry Kissinger in by the ear. “The record was unfortunately blunt,” she thinks. “The court had primarily investigated and made arrests in African countries, even as crimes against humanity proliferated around the world.”
Kitamura pays attention to the dark side of urban landscapes, the things we prefer not to learn about. “There are prisons and far worse all around us,” she writes, “in New York there was a black site above a bustling food court, the windows darkened and the rooms soundproofed so that the screaming never reached the people sitting below.”
All novels are, in a sense, about language, but “Intimacies” presses down on how meaning is made, and how it is compromised. Kitamura takes note of what she calls the “great chasms beneath words,” chasms that “could open up without warning.”
Skill and poise matter for an interpreter. If you sound flustered, so will the person for whom you are interpreting. One can easily, Kitamura writes, “threaten the witness’s entire persona.” The author evokes the endurance test that is a long day of translating. You can so lose yourself in the work that you don’t entirely realize what you’re saying, the gruesome crimes you might be describing.
This novel is in some senses “about” translation. (Nabokov said you want to learn a language just well enough to “understand the whisper behind one’s back.”) But 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.
In her work, there’s a winner and a loser in almost every social interaction. Her antennae are precisely attuned to magnetism, verbal dexterity, physical beauty and, conversely, their lack.
About the West African president on trial, for example, the narrator senses how the energy in the courtroom is sucked toward “the black hole of his personality.” 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.
Kitamura’s narrator is a bit of a cipher. In love, she’s a pushover, so much so that she fears she’s “complicit in my own erasure.” She hovers a millimeter above life. She has a concierge level of disengagement.
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, predawn drone shots of the stylish urban landscape and a thrumming score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
The word “translation” comes from the Latin for “bearing across.” With “Intimacies,” Kitamura has delivered a taut, moody novel that moves purposefully between worlds.