The narrator leaves busy New York after her father’s death for The Hague where she is to work as an interpreter at the International Court of Justice. She befriends Jana whom she had already met in London and who has moved to the Netherlands only a short time before her and who has already made the city her home. She cannot talk about her job outside the Court, not even with Adriaan, her kind of boyfriend who is still married to another woman. Unexpectedly, two major events come together, Adriaan needs to leave for a couple of days which soon turn into weeks and the interpreter is required in a high profile case: a former president of an unnamed African state is accused of crimes against humanity and she is to become the first interpreter. She does not only meet him in court but also when he confines with his lawyers where she sits close to him and can feel the impact and power the charismatic man can have on people. As the weeks go by, she struggles more and more, not only with her absent partner but also with how close she gets to a man who can only be considered a monster. Katie Kitamura’s novel “Intimacies” invites the reader into the thoughts of an interpreter who knows that the slightest mistake in her translation can have severe consequences. It also highlights the position of a job which is often overlooked but crucial in many ways and where people are forced to retreat behind words which is easier said than done. At times she feels depersonalised, like an instrument, but for the accused, she is the first person of communication. Many questions are raised throughout the plot, first, the question about belonging. The narrator does not have a place she can really call home. A cosmopolite speaking several languages and having lived in diverse countries, she does not know which place she could actually associate with a feeling of home. Her apartment in The Hague perfectly reflects this: she has rented a furnished place which she never managed to give a personal note. More importantly, however, is the place of the interpreter. Nobody prepares them for what they are going to hear at the court. The lawyers remain cool when being confronted with atrocious crimes, the interpreters react in much more humane way which can be heard in their voice immediately but which is considered unprofessional. Being often close to the accused over months, they form a very peculiar bond which makes them separate the deeds from the defendants. A wonderfully written homage to language and its force, even though there are a lot of things which remain unsaid in the novel.

Set in The Hague 'Intimacies' by Katie Kitamura (Penguin Random House, 2021) is a novel about trying to find your place in the world, whether that be a physical place or with a particular person. Kitamura's writing is taut and tight with a constant tension in the narrative. I raced through this book and can't recommend it highly enough.

One of Barrack Obama’s 2021 Summer picks – and given its subject matter that implies a real authenticity to the novel which in my view is more than matched by the power of its writing. The author has said that this book was initially inspired by listening to Charles Taylor (ex president of Liberia) defend himself against war crimes at The Hague. Later she visited the International Criminal Court there to observe the trial of Laurent Gbabgo (ex-president of the Ivory Coast): while there realising she had visited the sand-dunes near the Court as a child (an idea she uses in the novel). The unnamed narrator is an interpreter at the International Criminal Court – of Japanese-American descent (like the author) she has taken - rather on impulse - a 1 year maternity cover position there – moving from New York after her father’s death and her mother’s move to Singapore. She starts a tentative relationship with a newly separate man Adriaan – who invites her to move into his flat while he visits his estranged wife (who is in Lisbon with their children) to ask for a divorce. A friend of Adriaan’s wife – Kees – seems to go out of his way to cast doubts on her relationship with Adriaan, doubts not helped by a steady diminution in communication from Portugal. Her closest friend is Jana – a Serbian/Ethiopian descended curator at the National Gallery – who owns an apartment in an edgier part of town. A husband of a friend of Jana (an antiquarian bookerseller) is violently mugged near Jana’s apartment. The narrator becomes preoccupied with her friend’s brother, who was badly assaulted in a street crime in rather unexplained circumstances – which take a rather different tone when she later sees the man in a restaurant. She attends an exhibition that Jana has curated (which gives rise to some of the strongest moments of the book) And while all this is going on – the court gains a high profile new case (one I think very explicitly modelled on Gbabgo) and the narrator finds herself first of all asked to interpret when he is first bought to the Hague (actually based on a misunderstanding as to his choice of language) and then requested by the defence team – which turns out to be lead at a critical juncture by Kees - to aid their work. All of this – combined with events leading up to the book - leads to the narrator having a sense of uncertainty, destabalisation and of untethering – which very much lies at the heart of the book. Themes that the book explores include: The impact of evil and violence. The apparent cognitive dissonance between being pre-occupied with the cares and stresses of daily life while surrounded by wider and seemingly more weightier and terrible global matters as well as an associated sense of disorientation from a cascade of information: a dissonance and disorientation in the narrator’s life which also reflects 21st Century living against a backdrop of climate change and political turmoil. The pliability of language – and the way in which it can be manipulated to both defend and justify The challenges of interpretation (the author’s previous book was appropriately about a translator) - many of which ideas I think also stand for the difficulties of communication and understanding in relationships and even the difficulties of fiction writing The Westernism and apparent anti-African bias of the International Court – this is remarked on explicitly by both accused and acknowledged by court employees, but the most powerful moment is an unacknowledged one at Jana’s exhibition as they stand “around a bust of Johan Maurits, who founded the museum with a fortune built from the transatlantic slave trade” A brilliant discussion of Judith Leyster’s “The Proposition” (“Man offering money to a young woman”) with a feminist interpretation - and this painting I think is crucial to the book as it’s a motif that reappears through the book – with the narrator subject to the predatory and manipulative attentions of both Kees and (less explicitly) the bookseller and then more crucially the former President for who she is no more than an instrument to be used. A discussion of painting versus photography which again stands also for the idea of knowing someone in a relationship and for capturing them in fiction If there is a small false note in the novel – it’s when Jana’s friend Eline worries about the Brexit vote and that it is likely to go for Leave, which in turn “did not bode well for the upcoming elections in the United States” – probably making her the only liberal in the West who expected both the Brexit and Trump votes as something of an inevitability. The author is married to Hari Kunzru and the two are the first readers of each other’s work, and the two seem to be to explore similar ideas in their work (around communication). I am reminded a little in that respect of Catherine Lacey and Jesse Ball. However unlike Lacey and Ball whose work has a not dissimilar style and even some intertextuality – it is hard to think of a greater contrast between the quietly crafted and restrained exploration here and Kunzru’s compilation (although often not total coalescence) of disparate ideas. Overall I found this an impressive book whose quiet power grew on me during its reading.