The American writer, daughter of Japanese emigrants, is interested in the circulation of language, what he carries or what he hides. A central theme in “Intimités”, whose narrator is an interpreter at the International Criminal Court.
by Raphaëlle Leyris
A little before Christmas, Katie Kitamura lost her voice. “At the beginning, my children took advantage of the fact that I could no longer cry,” she said smiling. And then the very low tone that she was forced to adopt, and which was still hers during her visit to Paris, mid-January, began to worry the two boys. Their mother had conquered, by her whispers and her more rare speech, a new authority – one doubts, however, that she is cruelly lacking, looking at this elegant woman, at the haughty port of former classical dancer.
The American writer admits that this episode of slight aphonia offers an almost ideal gateway to discuss her new novel, intimate, whose narrator’s voice strikes as much by her singular tessitura as that of the mourners ( Stock, 2018), his third novel but the first translated in France. Voices that captivate by murmuring. She takes the time to think: “It is interesting, because it seems to me that in literature the power of persuasion in a voice depends first of all that the author removes, on what is not not said. “This conviction undoubtedly contributes to making this admirer of Marguerite Duras and Henry James an expert in ellipses.
If she does not hear the voice of her narration, Katie Kitamura says that she “[a] no book”. “Once I have it in the ear, and I have established the frame, my job is to follow it, to see where it brings me.” She continues, attentive to be understood: “More than Everything, what I try to catch on the page is the movement of a spirit. I like when a narrator says one thing then corrects it, and recovers again. The very first person narrations assured, filled with brilliant metaphors, shiny phrase from the start leaves me perplexed. No one speaks or thinks in this way. “His first two novels, The Longshot and Gone To The Forest (” The Outsider “, Free Press, 2009, and “Party in the forest”, Free Press, 2012, not translated), were more of this vein. “If a formulation did not seem stylistically impeccable to me, and even if the sentence expressed something that important to me, I deleted it. From this point of view, I changed a little.” What she tracks is less the perfection (or its appearance) that accuracy.
The narrator of intimacies has been an interpreter, recently hired at the International Criminal Court (ICC), which sits in The Hague. That of the mourners was a translator. These two novels belong to a “triptych” whose last part, which they are writing, will revolve around an actress. Katie Kitamura is interested (among others) in the circulation of language, in power dynamics that are exercised through her. There is nothing, in his two translated books, which looks like Small Talk, this art of trivial exchange. All the interactions seem to be nimmized of a danger aura or seem to be a matter of control to conquer – even when the characters would be worth it to specify the issues precisely.
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