Book Report: Intimacies

43. Katie Kitamura, Intimacies (2021) (8/31/21)

I stumbled on this book thanks to Barack Obama's annual summer reading list. At first I wasn't sure: it's one of these contemporary nameless-narrator, no-quotation-marks, run-on-sentence kind of books. The comma splices, oy!

But as I kept reading, I kept getting more engaged. 

The narrator is a young woman of part Japanese heritage who grew up traveling: she was used to an unsettled life. Her father recently died and her mother moved to Singapore, and she decided to leave her home of New York City for a job as a simultaneous interpreter, French to English, at an international criminal court in The Hague, Netherlands. She's been there six months when the story begins. A displaced person, in various ways.

Not very much actually happens in the book. Her boyfriend, Adriaan, leaves her in his apartment when he takes off to Lisbon to see his soon-to-be ex-wife; she interprets in the trial of an African war criminal; she has a few meals with friends and a colleague; she attends an art opening or two; she sits on a beach in the night. 

More than about what happens, though, this book is about how we negotiate reality, how we anticipate, and hope, and read other people's signals. How we, perhaps, manipulate events to our advantage, or adjust our expectations to allow events to carry on and simply see what comes next. 

The narrator is a keen observer, but we are also privy to her understanding of how her feelings are constantly changing as her perceptions shift. 

Here she is in a room at the Mauritshuis, an art museum:

The paintings opened up a dimension that you did not normally see in photographs, in these paintings you could feel the weight of time passing. I thought that was why, as I stood before a painting of a young girl in half-light, there was something that was both guarded and vulnerable in her gaze. It was not the contradiction of a single instant, but rather it was as if the painter had caught her in two separate states of emotion, two different moods, and managed to contain them within the single image. There would have been a multitude of such instants captured in the canvas, between the time she first sat down before the painter and the she rose, neck and upper body stiff, from the final sitting. That layering—in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity—was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography. I wondered if that was the reason why contemporary painting seemed to me so much flatter, to lack the mysterious depth of these works, because so many painters now worked from photographs.

Although in a sense I found this paragraph obvious, I quote it here because it also captures the layering of this novel: the individual moments which give way to reflections on those moments which give way to yearnings for the future which also conjure up moments from the past—and always there are questions. Everything blurs together, becomes confused. And yet here we are, living our lives, making choices as best we can. 

I liked this book. I might have given it 5 stars on Goodreads except for the comma splices. Which I'm almost coming to grips with: the run-on sentences kind of get at the rush of living a life, being swept up in time and doing our best to steer a straight course, learning to give ourselves over to uncertainty and yet still make sure to celebrate the small, anchoring intimacies.