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Summary
Summary
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
Named a best book of the year by the New York Times , NPR, Huffington Post , The A.V. Club, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, Refinery29, Town & Country, Harper's Bazaar, NYLON, BookRiot.
"Kitamura's prose gallops, combining Elena Ferrante-style intricacies with the tensions of a top-notch whodunit." -- Elle
This is her story. About the end of her marriage. About what happened when Christopher went missing and she went to find him. These are her secrets, this is what happened...
A young woman has agreed with her faithless husband: it's time for them to separate. For the moment it's a private matter, a secret between the two of them. As she begins her new life, she gets word that Christopher has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged south of Greece; she reluctantly agrees to go look for him, still keeping their split to herself. In her heart, she's not even sure if she wants to find him. As her search comes to a shocking breaking point, she discovers she understands less than she thought she did about her relationship and the man she used to love.
A searing, suspenseful story of intimacy and infidelity, A Separation lays bare what divides us from the inner lives of others. With exquisitely cool precision, Katie Kitamura propels us into the experience of a woman on edge, with a fiercely mesmerizing story to tell.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
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 writer and philanderer but 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.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE CRISIS OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS CONSTITUTION: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic, by Ganesh Sitaraman. (Vintage, $17.) The Constitution was predicated on having a thriving middle class, and today's widening inequality poses an existential threat. In this call to arms, Sitaraman excels in "helping understand how our forebears handled it and building a platform to think about it today," Angus Deaton wrote here. LINCOLN IN THE BARDO, by George Saunders. (Random House, $17.) In 1862, Abraham Lincoln visits the grave of his young son Willie, where he encounters a chorus of ghosts in limbo. Their voices - of slaves and slavers, doomed soldiers, priests - narrate the country's descent into war; as Lincoln mourns he becomes a steward of the nation's tragedies. The novel won the 2017 Man Booker Prize. BLEAKER HOUSE: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World, by Nell Stevens. (Anchor, $17.) As part of her M.F.A. program, Stevens is awarded a fellowship to travel virtually anywhere; she chooses the remote Falkland Islands to complete a book. Her memoir traces the fits and starts of the writing process and shares some hard-won insight. "Surrounded by people, it is easy to feel alone," she writes. "Surrounded by penguins, less so." A SEPARATION, by Katie Kitamura. (Riverhead, $16.) An unnamed, 30-ish British narrator tracks down her estranged husband, Christopher, in Greece after her mother-in-law intervenes; Christopher is traced to the southern Peloponnese, where he's supposedly studying mourning rites - and where marital deception proliferates. Our reviewer, Fernanda Eberstadt, praised the novel's "radical disbelief - a disbelief, it appears, even in the power of art - that makes Kitamura's accomplished novel such a coolly unsettling work." THE VANQUISHED: WHY THE FIRST WORLD WAR FAILED TO END, by Robert Gerwarth. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $17.) In the years between 1918 and 1923, crumbling empires, economic depression (along with the lure of Communism) and flawed peace negotiations helped set the stage for another global conflict. Gerwarth's fine history examines the legacy of World War I, with a focus on the "mobilizing power" of defeat. THE HEIRS, by Susan Rieger. (Broadway, $16.) A cryptic final wish sets off a knotty family drama; as the Falkeses mourn their patriarch, Rupert, a woman emerges and claims he was the father of her two sons. The evidence is plausible enough, and his family struggles to interpret the news. "Rieger convinces us that knowing the truth - believe it or not - doesn't necessarily settle everything," Caroline Leavitt wrote here.
Guardian Review
From the glamour of Glyndebourne to murder in Greece -- a woman's intriguing quest to find the husband who divorced her Katie Kitamura's first novel, The Longshot, was set in the closed, masculine universe of martial arts, while her second, Gone to the Fores t, was a fable of destruction set in an allegorical, unnamed country. This third novel also takes place in an attenuated world stiff with custom: that of the English upper classes and their sorrowful literary offspring. Here, everyone lives in the same neighbourhood, attends Glyndebourne and a round of dinner parties, and there are neither politics nor bills. Jobs have atrophied -- publishers commission books with no deadlines -- and so have gender roles. Our narrator accepts that a mother with three children is ipso facto "always in need of help and companionship"; that men only "achieve a little privacy [on] the shores of infidelity"; and that sex while menstruating is quite impossible. In this decorous world, the older generation are of Confucian importance: organising the opera excursions; owning the apartments; handing out the money. Thus, when the narrator's husband, Christopher, abruptly decides to divorce her and asks her not to tell anyone, this seems to mean primarily his parents. For the narrator herself has already moved on, and moved in, with one of their friends, so surely the dinner party circuit has noticed. She takes the request extremely seriously, however, to the point where, when she is ordered by her mother-in-law to go to the Peloponnese to look for Christopher, missing on a research trip, keeping her silence is her main preoccupation. The narrator surely counts, even in such enervated circles, as a peculiarly submissive character. She announces no name, friends, children, parents or even wishes of her own. She has chosen the profession of translator because of its "potential for passivity". She accepts the mission to Greece as meekly as she accepts Christopher's rejection, as she has also accepted, it emerges, over the course of their five-year marriage, his compulsive infidelities, open disregard and predilection for threesomes. Outwardly, that is. The narrator's inner monologue is a stream of dark thoughts, bubbling over into crowded run-on sentences. She is priggish and disdainful about her mother-in-law: "I did not take her concern with much seriousness. Isabella believed her relationship with Christopher to be better than it was, a natural response for a mother to make, but one which led to occasionally outlandish behaviour on her part." She is sly and sour about Christopher: "The next woman, there would always be a next, with a man like Christopher." And about that next woman, Maria, she is juicily, whole-heartedly malicious: "Perhaps now, as she sucked the meat out of the lobster's claw, her chin growing slick with butter, she was reliving her own seduction." But she seems unable to voice any of this aloud. However clear she is in her head -- and she spends many pages on abstract ideas as well as judgments of person -- when her turn comes to speak, her inner drips of self-doubt become a torrent and overwhelm her. She can't work out the protocol of conversations; she can't work out how much feeling she is allowed -- and does being married make a quantitative difference? She can't work out how even her own body functions in the outer world: "The purposes ... were sometimes too opaque: there had been many moments when its discreet parts -- legs, arms, torso -- made no sense even to me." She does occasionally flame into excitement, clear prose and confident feeling, but it is always vicariously and when emotion is being expressed at a performative distance: when she watches a traditional mourning singer perform grief, or when she is checking out the porn on Christopher's computer. This alienation is very much of the literary moment. As the narrator wanders musingly around the portent-stuffed resort, you sometimes wonder if she is a pastiche of Lydia Davis taking a nasty holiday in a Deborah Levy novel. But it makes her miserable, unable to get on with her relationship with her new man, Yvan, who is by some distance the warmest and most natural character in the book. It also makes her a useless detective. In Greece, she can't bear to ask direct questions, and even when a murder plot worthy of Inspector Montalbano lays itself out plainly before her, complete with dim policemen, Mediterranean sexual stereotypes, dirt roads and prickly pears, she worries too much to reveal it -- a decision that takes her, and us, to "the opposite of closure". Above all, with its Greek setting and divorce theme, A Separation evokes Rachel Cusk's Outline. The narrators of both books struggle with imaginative sympathy: both gaze at the people around them from a puzzled distance, wondering at their actions. Cusk's Faye, though, seems to have despaired of trying to explain other people, and, with radical humility, to have given herself over to recording them, being their "outline" instead. The narrator of A Separation, by contrast, does nothing but explain, her prissy, pinioning voice speaking for and around the other characters; reporting their speech; commenting on their actions, barely allowing them air. She barely allows us air, either, anxiously filling any space in our thoughts with her lengthy meditations and portentous conclusions. Some of these seem much too true -- "There is a reason why the dead haunt the living, the living cannot haunt the living in the same way" -- and some not nearly true enough: "Perhaps all deaths are unresolved." In the end, Kitamura's protagonist is a smart, accomplished, contemporary version of that ancient literary figure, the unreliable narrator, whereas Faye is a new invention. You finish Outline feeling uncannily lonely and opened; A Separation leaves you intrigued, impressed, but also artfully irritated. - Kate Clanchy.
Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.