frame 13 September 2021
Katie Kitamura: Intimacies
by Maria Alvarez
Katie Kitamura and Maria Alvarez
Katie Kitamura’s latest novel, Intimacies, an elegantly disarming masterpiece, is the most conclusive proof yet that she is one of the finest international literary writers of her generation.
Intimacies, an existential neo-thriller, explores the uncanny fracturing that we experience in moments of psychological and geographical transit, when we are missing the extra layer of psychological skin essential to ordinary survival. Her central unnamed narrator is a neurotic flaneuse, an enigmatic mix of articulate intelligence, surface calmness, and subterranean alienation: with a ‘complicity in my own erasure’.
Newly arrived in The Hague from New York after a bereavement, she begins working as an interpreter in the Court, an institution based on the International Criminal Court. She soon becomes involved with Adriaan, a married man in the throes of divorce, grows obsessed by a local violent act and increasingly compromised by the ethical boundaries of her work when she interprets in a trial of genocide involving a former African President. As the personal and political come into analogous and menacing relief, the novel performs mysteriously crucial detonations on the reader’s sensibility and moral compass. No surprise that Barack Obama promoted it on his summer reading list, nor that she has garnered blindingly good reviews.
Kitamura herself has the poise and unforced elegance in person that she exhibits in her prose. Married to fellow author Hari Kunzru, with whom she has two children, she lives in New York and also works as a journalist and art critic.
Why Intimacies in the plural as a title?
The original title was Terra Firma but when I read through the book at the end, I noticed so many instances of intimacies, many of which were undesirable - whether it was a closeness forced on someone who didn’t want it, physical harassment, or the unease of feeling closer to the state of mind of a perpetrator of war crimes.
The aspect of intimacy that comes across strongly both in the minutiae of social intercourse and in your protagonist’s professional work is the chasms - the difficulty of achieving it. How did you conceive of the relationship between intimacy and interpretation?
I think it’s in things that cannot be communicated. I grew up in a bilingual household and inevitably there are things that cannot be said totally in another language. The protagonist’s work is to confront and smooth over that gap as far as possible. The work of interpreters really is interpretation in the full sense of the word. It’s not just about communicating literal meaning but also conveying irony or humour, things that give meaning and context; they have to identify these things in the original language and perform it in the second. The protagonist is forever reading people and what makes her fun for me as a character is that her sense of other people is always unstable.
The wonderful irony of the interpreter who can’t interpret or over-interprets! The main character in your last novel, A Separation, was a translator and in Intimacies it’s an interpreter. There are significant differences but they do echo one another as professions. Would you say our relationship with language is central to you?
Yes, I’m interested in characters who are passive funnels for language, who in some way are not the author of the words they speak. In this book, I explore how interpreters feel a performative pressure, as their work is so in the moment, and how it is difficult to gain proper perspective as a result of being thrust so deep inside the language.
Tell me more about the fragile, dislocated sense of self which so intrigues you.
I find porous characters interesting. The protagonist in both A Separation and Intimacies have slipped out of situations. In A Separation she was married and is no longer. In Intimacies she has lost her father, she is grieving and she has moved abroad – she’s moved into a new situation and place where she has to be hyper-vigilant. I wanted to explore that transitional space.
The contrast between her smooth surface and this porousness to unfathomable threats is beautifully conveyed in your prose – the suspense moves through clear diction and syntax. Is menace something you deliberately created in the novel?
It comes quite naturally but I am certainly interested in borrowing from the genre of thriller and detective stories. A big influence for me is Javier Marias, whose works feel like mysteries and thrillers, but often end up turning into something very different. My aim was to create the sense of a thriller and explore it not through plot, but through that single consciousness.
I was also interested in different forms of violence that puncture the narrator’s life, violence endemic to the society that is both large-scale or small-scale. How do we reconcile this sense of scale, where a mugging happens along genocide? How do you exist in a world where those two things are happening and negotiate it?
Your prose is very calm and clear, which feels menacing. Do you stylistically tighten your prose to create that unease?
I have written with a tighter style in the past. Now I consciously try and do the opposite. The level of unease in the prose is in the fact that there is this destabilisation and uncertainty structurally. As a writer, the hardest thing is to leave the prose as loose as possible on the page - not to over-tighten or do too many pyrotechnics. It’s hard to write sentences that are not aiming to be flawless or great.
I’m interested in characters who are passive funnels for language, who in some way are not the author of the words they speak
Let’s talk about the anxiety relating to romantic intimacy. The protagonist’s relationship with Adriaan is a perfect depiction of the over-interpretation that can happen in relationships, especially initially. How one interprets the lover’s every word, their silences. She’s hilarious in her hyper-vigilance.
I’m so glad you said that because there are several scenes that are funny to me. There are moments of derangement that I think should be funny. I wanted the relationship with Adriaan to explore the difference between two points of subjectivity, which is encapsulated in the Judith Leyster painting, ‘A Proposition’, that she observes in the book – the male and female subjects are at such variance in the painting.
Judith Leyster, The Proposition, 1631
It’s interesting that in what unfolds in their relationship, she doesn’t push him, doesn’t demand - she’s quite passive.
The banality of the situation is interesting to me because it relates to this question of scale. How can she be as disturbed by these things [happening in her personal life] as by the things that are happening in her workplace? The central dilemma for this character is whether she’ll be able to step into her life, since both in work and her personal life she is characterised by her passivity. The passivity is both personal and ethical.
Framing all these intimate and personal intricacies is the International Court. Why did you want to bring that in?
The book was set in 2016 but written over the last four years, while I’ve been living in the US during all that’s been going on politically. I often think about our individual implication - how far we are personally implicated in complicated social and government structures. I wanted the protagonist to reconcile very personal concerns with much larger ones, with more significant occurrences. How do you do that as an individual?
The hardest thing is to leave the prose as loose as possible on the page - not to over-tighten or do too many pyrotechnics
You explore the intimacy the main character has with the witness and the accused in a genocide trial in her role as an interpreter, which raises moral questions of complicity and who can bear witness.
Yes, it’s a much larger moral question. Her work forces her to become close to a former president and I wanted to address what it means to become too close to someone who has done horrific things. This came to me after I met two interpreters at the International Criminal Court who had worked with a leader much like the president in the book. There was evidence he’d done all these things but he was let off on a technicality, and one of them said that in that moment he was filled with relief he wasn’t convicted, which was a profoundly destabilising moment for him. He felt he’d lost his ethical boundaries.
I was very conscious not to let the President in the novel be allowed to tell the story when it came to the genocide narrative - I wanted one of the victims tell the story. But I was also preoccupied by this issue of presumed neutrality. We all bring something of ourselves to interpretation, and the interpreter has a moment, while interpreting for the witness, where she feels that there is something wrong in speaking for this experience that is not her own.
There is in your novel a sense of hope amidst the bewildering chasm of language and morality - both personal and political.
As a writer you often visit the same terrain and here I wanted to move on, to get to this point of accommodation. There is never going to be a feeling of full disclosure – that is the fantasy of a younger person.
INTIMACIES is out now. Get your copy here.
Maria Alvarez is a writer, journalist and freelance editor.