INTIMACIES by Katie Kitamura

This novel has many similarities to A Separation, but I found it to be both less suspenseful and more satisfying.  Again, we have an unnamed narrator who is an interpreter (versus a book translator) for the International Court of Justice at The Hague in the Netherlands. In her most important case, involving a murderous former president, she interprets for the judge, the attorneys, and a witness for the prosecution.  She also attends private meetings of the former president’s defense team, which includes a distasteful man that she met at a party.  Her job is unsettling, as she finds herself unintentionally taking sides, but then her personal life is unsettled as well.  Her boyfriend has left abruptly for Lisbon, where his wife now lives with their teenage children, presumably to ask her for a divorce.  As his absence grows longer and longer, the narrator begins to doubt his true intentions.  In fact, this book is full of not only intimacies but uncertainties.  Is the narrator’s friend Jana truly a good friend?  Was the mugging of a man in Jana’s neighborhood really a mugging?  Then there is the uncertainty of her job.  She is currently working under a one-year contract and wonders if it will be renewed and, more importantly, whether she even wants it to be.  An assignment to interpret for a terrorist at the detention center in the middle of the night leaves her shaken, when the terrorist demands to speak in Arabic, when our narrator is there to interpret French.  The many incidents in this novel seem unrelated except that they all are experienced by the narrator, and the book really offers no perspective other than hers.  However, this novel is much greater than the sum of its parts, particularly in the way that it creates a mood of ambivalence in which truth is a little fuzzy and often unknowable.  The irony is that all of the intimacies that the narrator experiences only add to her sense of being a stranger in a strange land.