Before he became a journalist, I got a doctorate. In Russian literature. I do not miss the academic circles, but I miss the “field work” in Moscow: Roma taxis, Georgian wine, the political theater politically, and the growing astronauts, flirting with the “enemy”, etc. The thing that I loved to live in a foreign country is how much my mind is calm. I had to conceal the internal English monologue so that the Russian could find a way.
The only way I can return to the header now – especially now – is to read the work of the novelist Katie Kitamura. It was first pulled to its exact network, but the sticky is from language and moral mystery “before”season((2017) and)Intimacy(2021), a pair of novels narrated by gorgeous women reserved, fluttering elegantly in foreign countries. In “separation”, a London -based literary translator travels to Greece to search for her scattered husband, who disappeared in the story “who is losing”. The highest level – as a translator in the International Criminal Court.
Kitamura from California, and her new novel, “Test“She is her first group on our soil, but she still revolves around words that talk about her words completely. The main character is a middle-aged actress in New York City-Roy Kitamura, whose name is not revealed, respectively, is preparing for the blow in a play called” opposite beach “. She is struggling to explain a scene when there is a very attractive campaign called Xavier, and he opens the conspiracy of her life. Syriac.
Kitamura spoke about the absent love interests, the pleasures of the novel at the workplace, and why are it attracted to female supporters who want to refuse to sound on their voices. Our conversation has been edited and intensified.
The “test” begins with the protagonist of the novel as Zavier for lunch, and this long -running scene where the two say very little to each other. In fact, most events take place in looks, including the looks made by another dinner and waiter. There is this feeling that every person in the restaurant is trying to analyze the tissue of this relationship. Are they lovers? Are they the mother and the son? We, as readers, are similarly trying to measure it, such as, What does it mean to choose this restaurant? Is this a date? We are already ready through this first scene to explain the rest of the novel as on Interpretation at a level.
The first scene is very important for the novel because the couple is in the heart of the novel, the narrator and this younger man, becomes an object that many different people look, and they all explain the nature of their relationship differently. I am very busy with interpretation. It was a subject in the last three novels. I had a translated central character, one of the translator translator, then this character that explains the parts, and the interpretation of this new play and the struggle. The interpretation is at the heart of this novel in a funny way – even more than it was in my last novel, where the character is literally a simultaneous translator.
It is interesting to say that this novel revolves around the interpretation more than your novel, because there is more about behaving in “intimacy” more than in the “test”, where the main character is an actress. The “intimate” protagonist talks about the amount of her job that involves reflection and tradition. The simultaneous interpretation describes as a performance, and the court hall as a stage where everyone – lawyers and witnesses–He has a role to play.
I am attracted to the characters, especially women’s characters, who talk about the words of others. I am interested in negativity. This goes a little against a grain of what we were told to search for in imagination. I teach creative writing, and in the workshop, if there is a personality that the group feels that she does not have an agency, it is often established as a criticism of the character, as if the character was without an unreasonable agency or somewhat unconvincing. Of course, the reality is a very few of us has a complete agency. We work under the illusion or impression that we have a great deal of agency, but in reality, our choices are completely restricted.
So I am interested in photographing characters who may understand that negative a little more than what others may be, and those who are trying to deal with what this means.
In “Modernity”, I would like to say that the narrator, in the context of the novel, wonders at any point that the negative becomes a kind of collusion. Is it involved, as a simultaneous translator in the War Crime Court, in the institutional activity of the room where you work? I think in this novel, in “Test”, you have someone who has a clear feeling that the parts that are granted to play are insufficient. I refer to “parts” in theater and in life; She always plays a role that someone has delivered to her.
When talking about playing roles, I really surprised the breakfast routine that her husband imposed on her. So her husband, Thomas, learned, at an early point of their marriage, that she began to circumvent, and makes her atone by putting the breakfast table every morning with coffee and pastries from a nearby cafe – and the number of pastries begins to hit. As the novel continues, it becomes almost surreal and somewhat thin, this is an abundance of Danish every morning.
I hate breakfast. I never eat breakfast. I have a very disputed relationship with breakfast. I am a kind of not understanding the goal. I just want to be able to wake up and continue on my day with liquid caffeine only in my regime.
The novel generally contains a completely reduced plate – such as, it is not a novel in which the material reality of the world is clarified. There is a handful of things, and I always knew that I had to make things do a lot of work, and that they would be creatures that appear in the first half of the novel and then again in the second half of the novel with a different set of connotations and a different set of meanings. So I wanted to be more pastry than pastries in some way. I wanted them to feel a slight manager, as you know, they are continuing to appear, and there are always many of them. The narrator has never faced her affairs outside the framework of marriage, but in a very aggressive negative way, it creates these rituals that divide it into this worldly and bourgeois. It is incredibly boring, but this is the point: she adhered to marrying again through this act.
