February 1, 2021
Fleeing New York for an interpreter's job at The Hague brings little relief to the woman at the center of this new work by two-time NYPL Young Lions finalist Kitamura. Tangled up with a lover who's still tangled up with his wife, the woman has become close to the sister of a crime victim, and she finds that interpreting for an accused war criminal only adds to her stress.
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May 10, 2021
Kitamura’s plodding latest (after A Separation) follows a group of jet-setting young professionals in The Hague, where a translator finds herself enmeshed in the private lives of her colleagues. There’s something vaguely unseemly about the unnamed translator’s married suitor, Adriaan, as well as other characters, including her boss in Language Services, the preppy curator she house-sits for, and a book dealer who is mugged during a recent wave of violence. But it’s hard to discern what anybody is actually up to. Meanwhile, in the courts, the translator is entrusted with the cases of a recently extradited jihadist and a well-heeled former president of a West African country on trial for war crimes, with whom she must match wits. There are, unfortunately, plenty of unused opportunities for deeper character development; Adriaan in particular is built up as a nemesis, but he does little more than preen, while even less can be said of the various other dilettantes and sexual rivals. Subtle to a fault, this adds up to very little outside of a plethora of dinner scenes and undeveloped subplots, while the translator simply drifts through a Henry James–style chronicle of life abroad. Kitamura is a talented writer, but this one disappoints. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group.
Starred review from June 1, 2021
New to The Hague, an unnamed interpreter works in the International Court, her job "to ensure that there would be no escape route between languages." Describing herself as "guarded," she has one close friend and dates Adriaan, who's in a protracted separation from his wife and children. The day before his departure, Adriaan informs the interpreter that he must visit his family in Lisbon and will be gone for a week, maybe more. As a week becomes a month and his communication with her wanes, she's assigned the high-profile case of a former president accused of election tampering and ethnic cleansing. The defense team for the accused, inured by now to descriptions of his crimes, in addition to requiring her interpretation skills, exploits her emotions as a barometer for the court's reaction to them. Like her protagonist, Kitamura (A Separation, 2017) is a master of precisely evocative language. In her work and in her isolation, the interpreter recognizes how familiarity can obscure intimacy, while its lack can yet lead to discomfiting proximity. The novel takes place so deeply within her that it's truly personlike, at once forthright and mysterious, a piercing and propulsive meditation on closeness of many sorts.
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August 1, 2021
Kitamura's fourth novel, about a professional translator living in The Hague and dealing with personal and professional crises, makes for a tidy dyad with her previous book, A Separation. Both are deeply interior novels about women working their way through periods of displacement and reckoning with the fundamental mystery of ever truly knowing another person. Indeed, the titles of these two works could be fairly easily swapped, so similar are Kitamura's preoccupations. Like A Separation, this novel is haunted by specters of violence and doubt, tension built from its cerebral narrator's ruminations and observations. The action remains largely mundane by design, but Kitamura's way with character often inflects even that with a sheen of dread. Indeed, in many ways Kitamura emulates the tenor of any number of best-selling thrillers--peripheral characters are suspect, motivations are occluded, etc.--but her spare prose and refusal to ever offer summary conclusions keeps things all the more mysterious. Various narrative threads are woven, but they never web into any settled understanding; the author's tilt toward the existential peril of unknowing is fundamental to her sense of story. VERDICT Few things are more intimate (and terrifying) than the act of being in the world, and Kitamura's evocative interrogation of our ability to know ourselves and others is reinforced by the strength of her spare, haunting prose.--Luke Gorham, Galesburg P.L., IL
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Starred review from June 15, 2021
A watchful, reticent woman sees peril and tries not to vanish. "Every certainty can give way without notice," thinks the narrator of Kitamura's stunning novel, a statement both true and freighted. It's a delight to accompany the narrator's astute observational intelligence through these pages, as it was in A Separation (2017), which also unspooled completely in the mind of its speaker. Both slim books are pared down, without chapter headings or quotation marks. A murder unsettles A Separation; a mugging destabilizes this new book. Its narrator is a temporary translator at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where an unidentified head of state is on trial for atrocities in the months before the Brexit vote. The accused specifically requests the narrator to translate for him in a claustrophobic meeting with his defense team: "cross-border raid, mass grave, armed youth." She hears and doesn't hear the words amid her focus, just as she sees and doesn't completely register events in her everyday life. "It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed," she thinks, "the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know." This is the crux of Kitamura's preoccupation. She threads it brilliantly through the intimacies her character is trying to navigate: with new colleagues, women friends, and her beau, who goes away; with the work and with the nature of The Hague itself. Landscape holds a key, and on the final pages, the narrator intuits it might release her from some of the dread suffocating her. The novel packs a controlled but considerable wallop, all the more pleasurable for its nuance. This psychological tone poem is a barbed and splendid meditation on peril.
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