Intimacies
An interpreter at the International Criminal Court in The Hague becomes entangled in a war crimes trial and a complicated love affair. Kitamura's cool, precise novel treats language as both bridge and weapon. Among the most formally controlled novels of its year.
Side plots, a violent incident tied to her friend Jana’s neighborhood, a wealthy sibling pair, get introduced with real weight and then simply vanish, and the romance with a still-married man fares no better: he’s asserted to be magnetic without much shown to back it up. One reader says the book “promised me a five course meal but I got a pixelated GIF”, and finds the closing stretch swerves so hard toward melodrama she asks “Girl why was that ending written like a colleen hoover novel”. Others call the narrator’s flatness a barrier rather than a technique, complaining “Weird things happened for no reason” and that the voice itself reads “weirdly malleable”. A critic sums up the whole as “more slight than lasting”, polished sentences accumulating without quite enough underneath.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
