Katie Kitamura's "Intimacies"

LA Review of Books

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Katie Kitamura to discuss her latest novel, Intimacies, an existential thriller that follows an unnamed narrator who has recently moved to The Hague to serve as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court. Worldly, well-travelled, and multilingual, she excels at her new job, but grows increasingly uneasy. A similar sense of discomfort permeates her close relationships with an art curator, and with her love interest, a married man. Yet it is the Court, where she is interpreting for a former President of a West African nation who has ordered the carrying out of unbelievable atrocities, that gives rise to her strongest anxieties and to her questions about power, confrontations with violence, and the possibility of neutrality. Also Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground, returns to recommend Anne Michaels’ award-winning 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces.