Intimacies

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Reviewed by @han_ro_solo✨
📘📙📕📗📓

It’s rare to read a book that feels like it takes your breath away, but this is certainly one of those books. Katie Kitamura expertly explores, in beautiful detail, the different types of intimacies that one may encounter in their own life; be this with relationships, situationship, friendship, or in the power of language.

The book itself is an internal monologue of a nameless narrator as she explores life in The Hague, after moving from New York, following the death of her father and her mother’s move back to Singapore. The narrator is a proficient language interpreter and, through her job at the Court, is required to translate for an individual accused of war crimes. There are several intertwining scenarios that occur throughout the book, which allows the narrator to comment superbly on the theme of “intimacy” in each scenario.

The book takes us through the narrator’s emotional challenges before, during, and after the trial, both in and outside the courtroom and ties the various strands together in a neat little bow that doesn’t leave the reader needing more, but allows the reader to reflect on the meaning of each scenario; perhaps reflecting on how we would each act in the given situation.

This book is certainly not for everyone; some of you may hate the way that it’s written or the storyline may not capture you in the slightest. The way that it is written can be challenging (the author is a big fan of elaborate adjectives and I admit that I had to look up the meaning of a few of them). On the flip side, the author is also not a fan of speech marks (which is perfectly fine too) so you may find yourself re-reading a few lines here and there in the tone of speech the second time around. But the emotive language used by the author/narrator throughout is compelling and I would encourage everyone to read this at least once, just to experience the beauty of words and language.