“The record was unfortunately blunt,” she thinks. The defendants tend to be Black no one is dragging Henry Kissinger in by the ear. The narrator is a critic of the court, though she largely admires its work. There’s a perverse distinction, a sick sort of thrill, in being his favorite. The narrator is assigned to the trial of a former West African president, an unrepentant devotee of what is euphemistically called ethnic cleansing. A well-known jihadist glares at her as she works, as if she were responsible for the hell he’s in. She interprets for, and thus climbs inside the heads of, notorious criminals. Not a lot is happening but, as they say on airplanes, oxygen is flowing even though the bag may not appear to inflate.Ī skein of dread whorls around the narrator’s job at The Hague.
‘Red Comet’: Heather Clark’s new biography of the poet Sylvia Plath is daring, meticulously researched and unexpectedly riveting.‘Intimacies’: Katie Kitamura’s novel follows an interpreter at The Hague who is dealing with loss, an uncertain relationship and an insecure world.‘On Juneteenth’: Annette Gordon-Reed explores the racial and social complexities of Texas, her home state, weaving history and memoir.‘How Beautiful We Were’: Imbolo Mbue’s second novel is a tale of a casually sociopathic corporation and the people whose lives it steamrolls.Your animal instincts as a reader - the tingling of the skin, the eagerness to pick the book back up - may be engaged before the rest of you is.Įditors at The Times Book Review selected the best fiction and nonfiction titles of the year. One of Kitamura’s gifts, though, is to inject every scene with a pinprick of dread. The narrator’s voice is largely bloodless. “The Hague bore a family resemblance to the European cities in which I had spent long stretches of my life,” she reports, with the equipoise of one of Joan Didion’s narrators, “and perhaps for this reason I was surprised by how easily and frequently I lost my bearings.” (Her mother is in Singapore.) There are a lot of visas in her passport. Like nearly everyone in this novel, she leads a globalized, deracinated life. She’s in flight from New York City, where her father recently died. It’s about an unnamed woman - youngish, single - who goes to work as an interpreter at an international court at The Hague.
The light it emits is ghostly, like that from under the lid of a Xerox machine. Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel, “Intimacies,” is coolly written and casts a spell.
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