Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura

 

A translator working on a big human rights abuses case finds her life turned upside down.

A professional woman, single and feeling unsettled, has landed a job at The Hague. She works as an interpreter at an international court that hears cases of human rights abuses. The court has had a big win in managing to put on trial a notorious dictator. The woman, who narrates her story, must work uncomfortably close with the dictator.

In her personal life, the narrator struggling to find her footing. Things look hopeful when she meets Adriaan. Despite the fact that he is married with children (his wife recently left him for another man), he seems decent and sensitive. When he says he must visit his wife Gaby to sort out the final details of their separation, she waits, hoping that their relationship will soon bloom into something more serious. The narrator also has a friend, Jana, who is a gallery curator. While this friendship is ostensibly close, there are some cracks, a lack of trust, which makes things brittle.

Readers of Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy will enjoy this taut, often suspenseful story of a single woman going through a minor existential crisis. Kitamura creates a sense of tension through several unresolved mysteries, one involving a bashing, another being the outcome of the human rights trial. A third mystery occurs when Adriaan stays away much longer than expected.

Intimacies is a fine novel, one that explores the ethics of working closely with human rights abusers. The lawyers, translators and other professionals become numbed to the horrors of the crime being tried. A case of Hannah Arendt's “banality of evil”, which the narrator finds increasingly repugnant.

The only caveat with this novel is that the suspense that is built up doesn't pay off. Suddenly the reader finds herself at the close of the story but feels there is little time to tie up all the loose ends. The trial ends in a bit of a fizz and the mysterious mugging is not resolved. The man who was mugged, Anton, has many pages devoted to his character, but this plot line seems thrown over the top, to add to the atmosphere.

Enjoyable mix of thriller and existential exploration.