Karen's Reviews > Intimacies

A very precise, careful, attentively written book about state violence and how it is and isn’t personalized through our systems of blame and prosecution. The protagonist is an interpreter at The Hague, translating the testimonies and arguments of the trials of war criminals. She’s also somewhat adrift in the city, dating a married man with more power and a more established place in Dutch society. There are hints throughout of her precarity and of the potential for violence, administrative or otherwise, to affect her everyday life. A sense of deep unease pervades the whole book. And by the end, the story isn’t so much about what happens plot wise as it is about the exactitude of Kitamura’s observations and shadings of power, abuse, blame, guilt, hope, and justice.