An intelligent and expansive engagement with issues of communication, comprehension, understanding, and the linguistic and other spaces that may open up through which misunderstandings can enter or where language proves inadequate in the face of the unsayability of some actions and events.

Kitamura has crafted a narrative which suggests rather than asserts, in which a brittle narrator drifts in The Hague, and where almost everyone she encounters is experiencing some kind of fragility in their relationships. As an interpreter at the international court at The Hague, the narrator faces issues of how to speak for both witnesses of massacres, and in the voice of the corrupt perpetrator in an international genocide/war crimes trial. What does it mean to represent, even temporarily, the 'I' in other people's narratives?

But there is an equal interest in the smaller intimacies and misunderstandings that appear in close personal relationships, especially here with the narrator's lover, Adriaan, and her friend Jana. There is one whole plot thread of a bookseller who is assaulted that didn't really fit the wider pattern that I could see and which left me a bit stranded, hence the not quite five star rating.

Overall, though, this is a quiet but deeply thoughtful book that I found both impressive and compelling. I disliked Kitamura's previous [book:A Separation|32861038] but may well go back to it now that I'm attuned to her digressive and suggestive prose. A book I'd be delighted to see on the 2021 Booker list. 4.5 stars rounded up to 5.