
Intimacies
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Traci Kato-Kiriyama
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By:
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Katie Kitamura
A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2021
Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award in Fiction
One of Barack Obama’s Favorite 2021 Reads
An Instant National Best Seller
A Best Book of 2021 from Washington Post, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic, Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly
“Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller…. Katie Kitamura is a wonder.” (Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward and Eat the Document)
“One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times)
A novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.
An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.
She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: Her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.
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.
©2021 Katie Kitamura (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
“[C]ooly written and casts a spell.... One of Kitamura’s gifts…is to inject every scene with a pinprick of dread.... One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.... A taut, moody novel that moves purposefully between worlds.” (Dwight Garner, New York Times)
“[I]ntense, unsettling...Intimacies is very much a story that seems to be something familiar but soon morphs into something disorientingly strange.... [W]ith her Jamesian attention to the slightest movement of bodies and words, Kitamura keeps Intimacies rooted to the ordinary domestic experiences of her narrator, her petty jealousies, her passing suspicions. The effect is a kind of emotional intensity that’s gripping because it feels increasingly unsustainable. Who could endure that raw-nerve sensitivity to the power of language to love, to deceive, to promise, to kill? Kitamura pulls us through a rising panic of hyper-awareness until the story’s fever finally breaks with a note of hope and relief. But that can’t quell the novel’s reverberations, which expose something incomprehensible about the moral dimensions of modern life." (Ron Charles, Washington Post)
“Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel spins a taut web of dread from the start.... In cool, spare prose, Kitamura asks the book’s animating query: How should you go about your little life in a world where horrible things are happening?” (Stephanie Hayes, The Atlantic)
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Good Story - Tough Narration
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Pretty Good
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She was used and re-used and never seemed to recognize it.
Low connection
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At the same time, all this chilly detachment made it hard for me to care about any of the novel's three main storylines--the mugging of a bookstore owner, the trial of a corrupt leader, the narrator's relationship with a married man--or about the fate of the narrator herself. The result was impatience, a less acute form of boredom. I can see why the novel was praised, but am baffled as to why the NY Times considered it one of the year's five best novels.
Traci Kato-Kiriyama reads in an uninflected tone that is probably right for the narrator (impossible to imagine this read in a dramatic or expressive way) but that adds to the overall flatness.
Icy Intelligence
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Thrilling premise that falls short
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Interesting and relatively short
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Distracting to read, better on audible
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It seems to me it’s a book about a woman who is consistently out of her depth and all she wants is to settle in somewhere on solid ground.
The ending was very satisfying to me, unlike other reviewers. It made perfect sense for the evolution of the characters — though I’m not sure I’d be swayed as quickly as she was.
I also had a problem with the hard Gs of the narrator (brinG-inG) but luckily they were less noticeable after a little while.
Overall, I didn’t love it or hate it — but it wasn’t bad.
Not that bad.
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I loved Kitamura's writing, and the studied reflection she lent her protagonist on the intimacies of her work, social and love relationships. But the intimacies aren't just interpersonal, rather also with her sense of home in the city, her identity in the world at large, and with language, (See David Bellos' "Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything.")
I saw that some reviewers were unhappy with the narration, for what they described as its being monotonous. Similarly, readers noted the minimal punctuation in the printed book. I suggest that both are related to the protagonist's work as a court translator, in which she is expected to dryly convey the meaning of the speech, without adding any emotion of her own. I think Kato-Kiriyama struck the perfect balance in doing so in her narration.
Thank you, Yael, for this different reading experience.
Work-life balance of intimacies
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interesting book about a job I had never imagined
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