A Separation

November 14, 2016
The unnamed narrator of Kitamura’s third novel has been separated from her husband, Christopher, for six months when she travels from London to southern Greece to find him, prompted into action by Christopher’s mother, who is unaware of the separation and worried because her son isn’t returning phone calls. The narrator describes Athens traffic and the Peloponnesian coast, but it is her internal landscape—her imaginings, suspicions, speculations, thoughts, and feelings—that dominates the narrative. Habitually unfaithful Christopher has left his wife in the dark regarding much of his private life. She means to ask for a divorce, and then wavers. When she arrives at the hotel where he is registered, she delays calling his room. When Christopher fails to appear by checkout time, she takes no part in clearing out his things. When a pretty hotel receptionist turns out to be one of Christopher’s lovers, the narrator buys her dinner. The narrator’s deepest feeling comes not from learning the reason for Christopher’s disappearance but from listening to a professional mourner’s lament. Research into this mourning ritual had been Christopher’s excuse for visiting Greece, although even his mother understood he also anticipated extra-marital indulgences. Kitamura suggests but never specifies the extent of these indulgences; likewise she leaves plot issues unresolved. Instead, she focuses on capturing a disarray of contradictory emotions, delineating the line between white lies and betrayal, legal and personal relationships, the impulse to hold on and the need to let go. Despite the mysterious premise, readers may find that the narrator’s frequent contemplation frustratingly stalls the novel.

Starred review from December 1, 2016
Dread and lassitude twist into a spare and stunning portrait of a marital estrangement.At the end of this unsettling psychological novel, the narrator suggests that "perhaps wife and husband and marriage itself are only words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than can be contained in a handful of syllables, or any amount of writing." Kitamura's third work of fiction builds into a hypnotic meditation on infidelity and the unknowability of one's spouse. In precise and muted prose, the entire story unspools in the coolly observant mind of a young woman, a translator. She is estranged from Christopher Wallace, her "handsome and wealthy" husband of five years. He is a relentless adulterer; the narrator herself is now living with another man. The novel begins with a phone call from Isabella, a hostile and unpleasant mother-in-law, petulant that she can't reach her only son and ignorant of the separation. Christopher has decamped to rural Greece, and Isabella insists her daughter-in-law leave England to go after him. Thinking it time to ask for a divorce, she agrees. In the remote fishing village of Gerolimenas, there are grim portents: stray dogs, high unemployment, a landscape charred from a season of wildfires, and the hostility of a hotel receptionist who appears to have slept with Christopher. Each of 13 taut chapters turns the screw; at the beginning of the seventh there is a murder. Kitamura leaves it unsolved. Instead of delivering a whodunit, the author plucks a bouquet of unforeseen but psychologically piercing consequences. The narrator thinks, "One of the problems of happiness--and I'd been very happy, when Christopher and I were first engaged--is that it makes you both smug and unimaginative." As this harrowing story ends, her life is diminished and her imagination is cruelly awake. A minutely observed novel of infidelity unsettles its characters and readers.

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December 1, 2016
An unnamed narrator, a translator living in England, is relatively unbothered by her estrangement from her husband, Christopher, until she receives a worried call from his mother, Isabella. Unaware of the separation (Christopher wanted it to remain a secret), Isabella insists that her daughter-in-law go to him in Greece. The narrator didn't know he was there, though this isn't out of the ordinary for privileged, charming Christopher, a writerand philandererbut she agrees to go, and secretly, finally requests their inevitable divorce. However, when she reaches remote Gerolimenas, he's not there. She's calm, sure he's off doing research for his book on mourning rituals, seeking the women hired to wail at strangers' funerals that the region is known for. A midway reveal changes everything, though, and, with very little evidence and few clues, the narrator must interpret her husband's situation, sieving for readers the many layers of the story and its telling. At once cool and burning, Kitamura's (The Longshot, 2009) immersive, probing psychological tale benefits from its narrator's precise observations and nimble use of language.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2016

Kitamura, whose Gone to the Forest and The Longshot were finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, turns in a mindbender about a woman whose husband vanishes in the Peloponnese shortly after they separate.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2016

Although separated from philandering husband Christopher for six months, a London woman agrees to continue to postpone "the process...of telling people." Almost a month has passed since she last talked to Christopher, rendering her unable to answer his mother Isabella's unexpected request for his whereabouts. She travels to Greece at Isabella's insistence, arriving at the hotel where her errant spouse has a room, only to learn he's traveling. Her wait for his return amid strangers who have known him more recently, more intimately, has shocking results. Between an anniversary-celebrating couple flaunting their passion to an elderly woman who is a rare professional funereal "weeper," the woman confronts the disintegration of love: "perhaps wife and husband and marriage itself are only words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than can be contained in a handful of syllables, or any amount of writing." VERDICT Like her two previous novels (The Longshot, Gone to the Forest), Kitamura's latest is another tautly austere, intensely internal narrative, both adroitly lyrical and jarring. For readers seeking profound examinations of challenging relationships--think Pamela Erens's Eleven Hours, Jung Yun's Shelter, Ha Jin's Waiting --Kitamura's oeuvre will be a compelling discovery. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2016

Although separated from philandering husband Christopher for six months, a London woman agrees to continue to postpone "the process...of telling people." Almost a month has passed since she last talked to Christopher, rendering her unable to answer his mother Isabella's unexpected request for his whereabouts. She travels to Greece at Isabella's insistence, arriving at the hotel where her errant spouse has a room, only to learn he's traveling. Her wait for his return amid strangers who have known him more recently, more intimately, has shocking results. Between an anniversary-celebrating couple flaunting their passion to an elderly woman who is a rare professional funereal "weeper," the woman confronts the disintegration of love: "perhaps wife and husband and marriage itself are only words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than can be contained in a handful of syllables, or any amount of writing." VERDICT Like her two previous novels (The Longshot, Gone to the Forest), Kitamura's latest is another tautly austere, intensely internal narrative, both adroitly lyrical and jarring. For readers seeking profound examinations of challenging relationships--think Pamela Erens's Eleven Hours, Jung Yun's Shelter, Ha Jin's Waiting --Kitamura's oeuvre will be a compelling discovery. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.