Intimacies

Kitamura’s protagonist is a woman of many languages, many identities, who moves to The Hague to work as an interpreter for the International Criminal Court. There, she’s drawn into simmering personal and professional dramas. Her lover, Adriaan, invites her to stay in his flat indefinitely while he’s in Portugal visiting his estranged wife and their children. At work, she begins interpreting for the trial of a former president accused of heinous war crimes. Kitamura’s sentences can be labyrinthine and disorienting in ways that mimic her main character’s own uncertainty and ambivalence. In this novel that is always circling around questions of language, what matters most is what never gets said out loud.

The Financial Times says it best: “Intimacies is both a gripping read and a chilling consideration of what’s involved when we choose to ignore the things we don’t want to see, let alone understand.”

Katie Kitamura was born in Sacramento and educated at Princeton University. Her most recent novel, Intimacies, was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021 and was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Prix Fragonard, and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Grand Prix de l’Heroine. Her third novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. She teaches at New York University.

“Silence is so fundamental to my way of thinking about writing,” says Katie Kitamura about the empty or opaque spaces in her novel about a woman who makes her living with words.

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Join us

Katie Kitamura will be at Colgate on Thursday, Nov. 9, at 4:30 p.m. EST. Join us physically in the Persson Hall auditorium or join us virtually via Zoom. The in-person audience will be able to participate in a post-reading Q&A and book-signing. Everyone is welcome. Admission is free.

Want to find out what thoughtful readers are saying about Intimacies? Join Colgate faculty and students on Monday, Nov. 27, from 7-8 p.m. EST for a conversation about all three November Living Writers books. (No preparation is required.) Register here.

Go beyond the book

“Kitamura’s fascination with beauty exists in tension with the book’s richest theme: how we decide how close we get,” writes Katy Waldman in this New Yorker article that arrays Intimacies alongside Ms. Kitamura’s earlier novels.
“Intimacies is coolly written and casts a spell. The light it emits is ghostly, like that from under the lid of a Xerox machine,” writes Dwight Garner in this New York Times review.
Reviewing Intimacies for the Washington Post, Ron Charles says the novel’s “reverberations expose something incomprehensible about the moral dimensions of modern life.”