A young interpreter adrift in The Hague

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura is her second novel narrated by an unnamed woman.  The first was A Separation and that narrator was a married translator. Intimacies' narrator is single and an interpreter at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. (She has native fluency in English and Japanese "from my parents" and French "from a childhood in Paris," plus professional proficiency in Spanish and German. A polyglot.) Both novels have interesting things to say about language and the difficulties in moving from one to another. 

The narrator in Intimacies has come to the Netherlands to escape New York and work at the Court. Her father is dead, her mother lives in Singapore, she has no siblings, no friends, no lover. She is looking for a place to finally call home.

She meets and becomes the lover of Adriaan who is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. She makes friends with Jana who witnesses a seemingly random act of violence virtually on her doorstep. The interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with with the crime as by chance she befriends the victim's sister (The Hague is not a big city.). And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s required to interpret in a trial in which the former president of an African country is accused of war crimes.

The publisher says, "A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life."

I had a sense of a woman adrift. She is good at what she does, indeed the Court offers her a permanent position. Interpreting the words of an accused mass murderer, however, is too much for her. Adriaan goes to Lisbon to meet with his estranged wife, leaving the narrator with the keys to his apartment and a promise to call. He doesn't, and I found it difficult to understand why she does not do something to resolve the situation until a resolution is forced on her.

Kitamura's descriptions of the former president's arrival in The Hague, the preparations for trial, and the trial itself are brilliant. I had a clear sense of the narrator's involvement with and attitude toward the former president and the man's feelings about his arrest and trial. For me, however, this was not enough to endear Intimacies to me.