I hadn’t heard of Katie Kitamura until there was a small online to-do about her lipgloss. Kitamura, in an interview with New York Magazine, included a $24 lipgloss in a listicle of “15 items she can’t live without.” My regular internet reading brought to me a Hot Take about Katie’s love of this lipgloss, and here’s the Hot Take: including this very silly item in her list is tone deaf (lipgloss in this economy!?), and furthermore, lipgloss has nothing to do with literature, so it’s distracting from the Serious Work of Writing.
I guess you could say that the New York Magazine article had its intended effect, because I was so annoyed by the reactionary anti-lipgloss Hot Take that I bought Kitamura’s book. Take that, hot take industrial complex!
Anyway, I went into this book with no preconceived notions, and I enjoyed it. It’s a short one, I read it easily in a day or two, and it’s very sharp.
The basic plot is that our unnamed protagonist has recently moved to the Netherlands and is a translator for a (fictional but obviously it’s the ICC) high court dealing with war crimes. In her first year in the Hague, she is slowly getting to know the city and her job. She makes friends; acquires an almost-divorced lover; and is a translator for a fragile, gruesome, high-profile court case.
That’s the plot almost in its entirety, but Kitamura uses it to explore the spaces that linger in between people – the spaces of intimacy that are shared or abandoned. There is a sense of unease throughout the novel. I wondered several times if this was going to be a novel that took a surprisingly dark or violent turn, but I realized that, no, the darkness Kitamura is interested in is the fogginess of our search for intimacy: can I trust this person? Do I really know this person? Are we being honest–and is it actually possible be honest with each other? And she’s exactly right that these questions are uneasy questions.
Kitamura has an efficiency with language that is compelling. She withholds and indulges very strategically. What in another novel would be an action-filled or emotional plot point is here summed up quickly (on the first page, we learn that her father died and so she left New York!), while she lingers on descriptions of, say, a benefit dinner hosted by a friend, or the book of old maps that the protagonist impulse buys. I was thinking about these scenes after the book was done – she used them so deftly as a shorthand for the things we find ourselves compelled to do, or to notice, or to perform, as we search for intimacy with each other and ourselves.
Recommended if you want a readable but smartly layered book that deals with The Human Condition and also sticks the landing with the ending.
Katie, go get yourself another lipgloss!