Intimacies by Katie Kitamura with Libertine Syrah #3

Something about this time of year has me turning “inward”— toward a certain type of book, or rather, a certain tone of book: A Winter Book, if you will, a distinction that has less to do with the weather as it does with the current atmosphere of my mind. A trap just for me. To read Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies is to feel at once unmoored by its tonal range and yet firmly rooted in its structure: the possibilities of a year. A single year. And while Intimacies seems to tick all of the boxes for the type of hyper-contemporary novel we’re seeing more of these days, obsessed with interiority, structured by short periods of time, a narrator on the fringes of self-understanding, it does so in a way that gets under the skin: the narrative itself implicated in what it means “to face inward, to turn your back on the storm brewing outside.” The novel’s field of vision explores the intimacies of knowledge, and, even further, the intimacy of the things we do not know. It is a novel about interiori