maiakobabe 's review for:

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

3.75

emotional reflective tense medium-paced

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A multi-lingual woman moves to the The Hague from New York after the death of her father to take a job as an interpreter at the International Court. She makes friends and acquaintances slowly, and becomes involved in their personal dramas. A close friend, Jana, is shaken up by a violent mugging that occurs outside of her apartment and tries to find more information about the victim and his family. A man the main character starts seeing turns out to be separated from, but not divorced from, a wife he has two teenage children with. And one of the criminals in an ongoing court case begins to request the main character specifically to interpret his meetings with his lawyers, surprising her with his calm confidence and seeing indifference to his crimes. Not very much happens in this book, but I was drawn into the slice of life scenes and their different iterations of the theme of intimacy- romantic, linguistic, emotional, familial, manipulative, fearful, hopeful.