Intimacies

A Novel

By: Katie Kitamura

Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama

A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2021

Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award in Fiction

One of Barack Obama’s Favorite 2021 Reads

An Instant National Best Seller

A Best Book of 2021 from Washington Post, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic, Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly

“Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller…. Katie Kitamura is a wonder.” (Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward and Eat the Document)

“One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times)

A novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.

She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: Her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.

A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.

©2021 Katie Kitamura (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“[C]ooly written and casts a spell.... One of Kitamura’s gifts…is to inject every scene with a pinprick of dread.... One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.... A taut, moody novel that moves purposefully between worlds.” (Dwight Garner, New York Times)

“[I]ntense, unsettling...Intimacies is very much a story that seems to be something familiar but soon morphs into something disorientingly strange.... [W]ith 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. Who could endure that raw-nerve sensitivity to the power of language to love, to deceive, to promise, to kill? Kitamura pulls us through a rising panic of hyper-awareness until the story’s fever finally breaks with a note of hope and relief. But that can’t quell the novel’s reverberations, which expose something incomprehensible about the moral dimensions of modern life." (Ron Charles, Washington Post)

“Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel spins a taut web of dread from the start.... In cool, spare prose, Kitamura asks the book’s animating query: How should you go about your little life in a world where horrible things are happening?” (Stephanie Hayes, The Atlantic)

Good Story - Tough Narration

Hard to get attached to the story with a halting monotone narration. Not much dialogue to work with.

Pretty Good

I'm not sure what this book was really about. A woman moves to The Hague in Amsterdam as an interpreter in the Court which entails reading the nuances of their language and tone of voice. It seems that this carries over to her relationships with her friends and acquaintances. I never got a sense of who this woman was but rather that she spends most of her time thinking about what is or isn't been said.

Low connection

I never cared much about the protagonist. She had an important job, interesting background but did not live up to expectations of those around her.
She was used and re-used and never seemed to recognize it.

Icy Intelligence

The setting is interesting, the writing is precise, the atmosphere is full of vague menace. The political and personal undercurrents of the novel express the uneasiness and uncertainty many of us feel at this moment. Kitamura's carefully scrubbed prose has a cool intelligence that is hard to resist, and her narrator is detached yet attentive to everything, as one imagines an interpreter for the International Court would have to be.

At the same time, all this chilly detachment made it hard for me to care about any of the novel's three main storylines--the mugging of a bookstore owner, the trial of a corrupt leader, the narrator's relationship with a married man--or about the fate of the narrator herself. The result was impatience, a less acute form of boredom. I can see why the novel was praised, but am baffled as to why the NY Times considered it one of the year's five best novels.

Traci Kato-Kiriyama reads in an uninflected tone that is probably right for the narrator (impossible to imagine this read in a dramatic or expressive way) but that adds to the overall flatness.

Thrilling premise that falls short

I wanted to like this more, as it made me think of a profession I've never thought about (language translating at the Hague for war criminals). I thought this would be more of a psychological thriller, especially when the former president's case comes through, and the protagonist has to spend more time with this reprehensible person. You meet some interesting characters - a friend whose at the center of the art world, a new boyfriend whose still married to his cheating wife, a bookstore owner who is mysteriously assaulted. But nothing really happens in the end, and even the boyfriend plot, which takes up a significant portion of the book, doesn't resolve in a satisfying way.

Interesting and relatively short

Interesting protagonist- a translator at the Hauge. I never really identified with her, her situation, or her friends but it broadened my perspective of the lives of people who live away from ‘home’, or don’t identify as having one.

Distracting to read, better on audible

Engaging story about love, understanding, and forgiveness. The unconventional grammar and punctuation in the written book were very distracting. I enjoyed listening to it as it made more sense. I liked how it felt like you were inside the brain of the individual, thinking her thoughts.

Not that bad.

The reviews seemed to love or hate this book. I think it’s a problem of expectations. It has a tag about being like a psychological thriller etc, and it’s definitely not that.

It seems to me it’s a book about a woman who is consistently out of her depth and all she wants is to settle in somewhere on solid ground.

The ending was very satisfying to me, unlike other reviewers. It made perfect sense for the evolution of the characters — though I’m not sure I’d be swayed as quickly as she was.

I also had a problem with the hard Gs of the narrator (brinG-inG) but luckily they were less noticeable after a little while.

Overall, I didn’t love it or hate it — but it wasn’t bad.

Work-life balance of intimacies

I'm not a dictator or defense lawyer, so this book challenged my guy-compromised EQ.

I loved Kitamura's writing, and the studied reflection she lent her protagonist on the intimacies of her work, social and love relationships. But the intimacies aren't just interpersonal, rather also with her sense of home in the city, her identity in the world at large, and with language, (See David Bellos' "Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything.")

I saw that some reviewers were unhappy with the narration, for what they described as its being monotonous. Similarly, readers noted the minimal punctuation in the printed book. I suggest that both are related to the protagonist's work as a court translator, in which she is expected to dryly convey the meaning of the speech, without adding any emotion of her own. I think Kato-Kiriyama struck the perfect balance in doing so in her narration.

Thank you, Yael, for this different reading experience.

interesting book about a job I had never imagined

it took a while for me to get involved in this story but I did grow very interested in it. I was fascinated by the work of the translations that she did and her description of separating the words of the dictation with a feelings that it could arouse. overall, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it.