INTIMACIESBy Katie KitamuraEarly in Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel, “Intimacies,” the unnamed narrator recalls watching three street cleaners in The Hague “carefully extracting cigarette butts from between the cracks of the cobbled road, one by one by one … despite the fact that there were several well-placed public ashtrays on that stretch of street alone.” The sight of these immigrant men laboring with their “elephantine vacuum” exemplifies how “the docile surface of the city concealed a more complex and contradictory nature,” and how the “veneer of civility was constantly giving way, in places it was barely there at all.”On first read this scene demonstrates the narrator’s quiet, observational mood, as she’s just left New York after her father’s death and “had begun looking for something, although I didn’t know exactly what,” but on reflection it pierces several thematic layers, and sets expectations. In this interpersonal thriller, Dutch methods of urban trash removal are rendered in greater detail than our heroine’s nearly absent back story. Character motivation and development are less important here than the systems within which those characters live. “Don’t shoot the messenger, she almost added, before remembering that this was precisely the kind of thing the accused did, it might even have been on the list of crimes, actually shooting the messenger. Although she knew there was nothing the man could do to her, she could not deny that she was afraid, he was a man who inspired fear, even while sitting immobile he radiated power.”

Source: International New York Times July 20, 2021 09:00 UTC