Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

This book is on Obama's summer reading list, and as you might expect from him as a recommendation, it is a novel with a couple of layers to it, and in the end you might still be a bit perplexed. The main character is escaping an emotion charged situation at home, and when she takes a job as an interpreter at the Hague, working with people who are pursuing war criminals on the world stage, she is maybe not in the ideal place in her own life to balance the emotional intensity that is inherent with the job. The woman arrives in the Netherlands with no ties, and when we enter, she is enmeshed in a relationship that is equally fraught with challenges as those presented by her job. Her boyfriend has a wife he is not voluntarily losing and children who he intends to bring back to him, and while you would hope that an interpreter might be good with language, that is not the case here, and she is not reading the text or the subtest. All the while she is working with people who are accused of doing horrible things and their vicitms. The work is clearly deeply disturbing, and yet it seems to come as a bit of a surprise to her. “My job,” she says, “is to make the space between languages as small as possible.” And as we learn more, we understand just what kind of psychological demands that process of translation involves in this setting, even if she is slow on the uptake. A very thought provoking book with a protagonist who you can root for, even if she repeatedly makes choices you would advize against.