“Intimacies” by Katie Kitamura: Front flap suggests multiple personality

The nameless protagonist, a first-person narrator, is a simultaneous translator for the international court at The Hague in the Netherlands. The front flap calls her “a woman of many languages and identities” (1), which inadvertently suggests a subtext of multiple personality.

Her namelessness, in and of itself, suggests multiple personality, because there is only one psychological circumstance in life where namelessness is not uncommon: alternate personalities in multiple personality.

The protagonist’s archenemy and antithesis is her lover’s, Adriaan’s, estranged wife, Gaby, who is criticized for having a single personality: “Gaby has always been herself, Adriaan said irritably” (1, p. 41).

In contrast, the protagonist saw “the prospect offered by a new relationship [as] the opportunity to be someone other than yourself” (1, p. 47).

She thinks of herself as having “parts,” a common euphemism for alternate personality: “A part of me was relieved” (1, pp. 76-77).

But sometimes “The thought was disquieting—that our identities should be so mutable” (1, p. 101).

Of course, men, too, may be mutable: “He appeared different in some way that I could not immediately identify, as if another version of himself were poking through the familiar exterior” (1, p. 220).

Comment

Since the author did not intend to raise the issue of multiple personality, its inadvertent presence in the subtext may reflect the author’s psychology.

1. Katie Kitamura. Intimacies. New York, Riverhead Books, 2021.