What is it about?
Katie Kitamura’s dazzling Intimacies follows an interpreter who moves to The Hague to work at an international court. Her work is to translate the words of others, including a former president on trial for war crimes. Around that, she is living in a borrowed flat, in a half-formed relationship with a man who may or may not be leaving his wife, and trying to understand a city where she has no real anchor. The book stays very close to her point of view. Most of the action is small: conversations, walks, dinners, work days in the courtroom. The tension comes from how close she stands to events she cannot influence. As we follow the protagonist, he cumulative effect of Kitamura’s deft, spare sentences slowly becomes a labyrinth. And we realise, the Kitamura, in her simple elegant and restrained style is posing all of life’s big questions- without ever once stating the obvious.
Why we fell in love with it
Kitamura never explains more than she has to. The narrator’s job — to be present, accurate, and invisible — shapes the whole book. She is always in between: between languages, between versions of the truth, between people who want to use her as a channel. That feeling of being near power and violence but never in control comes up very often. The prose matches this: controlled, neutral on the surface, but full of pressure underneath. It asks serious questions about guilt, loyalty, and distance without putting speeches in anyone’s mouth. This kind of writing, or restraint, is so rare in these days of opinion saturation and the glorification of the obvious- that you would feel like saving the book like a treasure in your shelf.
What might not work
For people invested in character building, there might be disappointment that any biographical information about the protagonist, arrives in scraps and asides because, the attentions of Kitamura’s narrator are mostly directed outward. But soon you realize that the writer is using this incoherence, this lack of detail to make the specificity of the narration become universal.
Why you should read it
Read Intimacies if you’re interested in books where the real action is in how a person thinks, not in what “happens.” It’s a short novel, crisp and precise, and so wonderfully layered. It places us in the role of a witness without authority, as almost all of us are. If you know the feeling of living between languages, or of being close to decisions that are never yours to make, this will ring true. It’s also a good example of how far you can go with minimal means: with no flourishes, no tricks and just steady, careful observation.
Score: 9.6/10
Babel School of Languages 