Katie Kitamura Translates the Untranslatable

[ This is one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021. See the full list. ]

INTIMACIES
By Katie Kitamura

Early in Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel, “Intimacies,” the unnamed narrator recalls watching three street cleaners in The Hague “carefully extracting cigarette butts from between the cracks of the cobbled road, one by one by one … despite the fact that there were several well-placed public ashtrays on that stretch of street alone.” The sight of these immigrant men laboring with their “elephantine vacuum” exemplifies how “the docile surface of the city concealed a more complex and contradictory nature,” and how the “veneer of civility was constantly giving way, in places it was barely there at all.”

On first read this scene demonstrates the narrator’s quiet, observational mood, as she’s just left New York after her father’s death and “had begun looking for something, although I didn’t know exactly what,” but on reflection it pierces several thematic layers, and sets expectations. In this interpersonal thriller, Dutch methods of urban trash removal are rendered in greater detail than our heroine’s nearly absent back story. Character motivation and development are less important here than the systems within which those characters live.

As a court translator for an unspecified international entity, the narrator is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of the “plethora of war criminals in our midst.” In her words, “it was the job of the interpreter not simply to state or perform but to repeat the unspeakable,” though she later wonders if translating the details of those atrocities caused them “to recede further and further into some state of unreality.” She eventually begins to see her colleagues as “marked by alarming fissures, levels of dissociation that I did not think could be sustainable.”

As another interpreter, Amina, relates an accusation against a former militia leader, she reflexively slips into “a voice of cold disapproval, as if she were a wife scolding a husband for some small domestic failing.” The unrepentant man on trial, offended by her tone, levies an intimate and intimidating look upon her. “Don’t shoot the messenger, she almost added, before remembering that this was precisely the kind of thing the accused did, it might even have been on the list of crimes, actually shooting the messenger. Although she knew there was nothing the man could do to her, she could not deny that she was afraid, he was a man who inspired fear, even while sitting immobile he radiated power.”

Kitamura’s prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention: Commas hitch complete thoughts together, quotation marks are eschewed and ancillary characters often interrupt the narration midsentence, without punctuation. This style mirrors the book’s concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies — especially between the sincere and the coercive — while Kitamura’s immense talent smooths the seams. Even in complex court scenes when the voices of interpreters, witnesses, lawyers and judges commingle, nothing is lost in her sleek and satisfying syntax.

Despite herself, our narrator has fallen into an entanglement with Adriaan, a man whose wife recently “went away to Lisbon for the weekend and never came back.” She learns of the marriage by way of an odious stranger at a party, a man named Kees who is coincidentally a defense lawyer for a former African president accused of ethnic cleansing, whose case she’ll soon be assigned. “It seemed extraordinary that they would trust this man,” she thinks, “a man of the flimsiest construction, in this most critical of matters.”

The lawyer’s appearance in our narrator’s personal and professional lives is one of many serendipities, a web of intimacies that scaffold the book: connections of violence, omission, infidelity or even the brief exposure of an overheard conversation. Intimate, intimacy and intimacies appear repeatedly in the prose, almost annoyingly so, yet synonyms are inadequate; intimacy is the structuring principle of “Intimacies” and no other word quite captures her meaning.

One of the most potent scenes in the novel comes when a young woman testifies to seeing her family slain by the former president’s militia. When a lawyer asks why she fled her hiding place to witness this horror, the woman pauses, so the interpreter pauses. “Because I wanted to protect my family,” she says. “How did you hope to protect your family?” the lawyer asks. “With my body. It is small and it does not look like much but it can stop a bullet.” As the narrator translates she cannot help looking at the former president, “who had no need for these layers of interpretation. Who sat bolt upright and did not move, and whose gaze was trained with utmost attention and care upon the witness.”

Reading, too, can be a deeply interpretive act, and a novel like this one offers the reader much to work with, raising a chorus of harmonic questions rather than squealing a single answer. Contemporary American novels too often deliver pre-solved moral quandaries and obvious enemies in service to our cultural craving for ethical perfection — the correct word, the right behavior, the sole and righteous position on myriad complex issues.

Kitamura works outside of this trendy literality by knowing, as the best writers do, that a story’s apparent subject does not determine its conceptual limits; plot summary would do this book no justice. Though the words “emotional labor,” “feminism” and “colonialism” never appear, it is still deeply engaged with these grand social issues, while it also makes subtle comments on everything from art to jealousy to gentrification.

Still — an ungenerous reader might note the male object of affection and assume the story is about a lonely woman’s search for love, simply because the narrator is slightly directionless and waiting for her Dutchman to come home. It is true that “Intimacies,” like Kitamura’s previous and equally engrossing “A Separation,” scrutinizes the knowability of those we love, depend upon and sleep beside. Yet Kitamura investigates these relationships as a lens for larger points, not as an end in themselves. The path a life cuts through the world, this book seems to say, has its greatest significance in the effect it has on others.

“Interpretation can be profoundly disorienting,” the narrator reflects, “you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself, that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: You literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning.”

This disorientation might feel familiar: In a time when so many intimacies have been forced or foreclosed by quarantine, this novel is felicitous. Breath itself, that intimate air, has united our worlds in death and fear. Even global events — a pandemic, a protest, a war — arise first in the delicate space between people.

The sinister man on trial “is petty and vain but he understands the depths of human behavior. The places where ordinary people do not go. That gives him a great deal of power, even when he is confined to a cell.” Kitamura’s work also contains a keen understanding of human behavior, one that reaches far beyond the pages of this brief and arresting book; she travels to places that ordinary writers cannot go.