A Separation by Katie Kitamura
“It began with a telephone call from Isabella. She wanted to know where Christopher was, and I was put in the awkward position of having to tell her that I don’t know. To her this must have sounded incredible. I didn’t tell her that Christopher and I had separated six months earlier, and that I hadn’t spoken to her son in nearly a month.”
And so begins Katie Kitamura’s third novel, an absorbing mystery, not so much about her missing husband, but about the mysteries of the “crazed wager” called marriage.
Isabella has managed to track her son down to a remote part of Greece and orders her daughter-in-law to go and find him. Her feral motherly instincts “know that something is wrong.”
Rather than admit to their separation, she obeys, and the unnamed narrator uses the charge as a motivator. She is already living with Yvan, an old acquaintance of her husband, so it seems time to ask for a divorce. For reasons unexplained, Christopher had wanted to keep their separation secret. She sees it as “my last dutiful act as [a]daughter-in-law.”
She arrives at an almost empty hotel in rural Geroliminas, it is off season. Yes, he has checked in but he left a few days ago and kept his room. She decides to wait for his return but, it seems, our narrator is always one step behind her husband.
Each of these steps behind allows her to reexamine him and her marriage. “In the end, what is a relationship but two people, and between two people there will always be room for surprises and misapprehensions, things that cannot be explained.”
Christopher was in Greece to conduct research for a book on the “study of mourning rituals around the world.” This part of Greece is home to the weepers, women who were “paid to issue lamentations at funerals.” Our narrator finds herself meeting one of these mourners and upon hearing her singing in “atonal registers” she is stunned by the performance “I wanted her to stop—she was in pain, and to what purpose?...I understood that this was why she was paid, not because of her vocal capabilities, not even for the considerable strength of her emoting, but because she agreed to undergo suffering, in the place of others.”
As the story unfolds it is clear that this book is a book about grief. We know that the marriage is doomed and in her quest for the divorce the narrator directs her sharp, laser like focus on understanding her relationship, what went wrong, and grieving for its end.
The narrator is detached, cool and somewhat distant. Her occupation is a translator, “translation’s passivity appealed to me…the translator’s ultimate task is to be invisible.” And in some sense she is invisible even though the story has only one point of view, hers. We really know more about other characters in the book then we do about her. Isabella, the hotel staff Maria and Kostas, her driver Stefano all refracted through her lens. She is not an unreliable narrator, but she is definitely a limited one. Yet the book doesn’t suffer from this unilateral perspective.
Christopher is handsome and wealthy and a philanderer, “whose life was intact in all its key particulars…Christopher was a charming man, and charm is made up of surfaces—every charming man is a confidence man.” Isabella is imperious and hard edged. The narrator senses immediately, Maria, may have been intimate with her husband “She would have been susceptible to Christopher’s charm—he was handsome and wealthy, alone and unencumbered, evidently idle (only an idle man could stay in this hotel and village for so long).”
Kitamura is a beautiful, understated writer. She paints a vivid picture of people and places with the use of economical and precise prose that has an elegance without indulgence. This is a story about feelings and analyzing them but it is never slow or meandering. In fact, she packs all the propulsion of a mystery story without any cheap tricks. When Christopher is found halfway through the book, Kitamura resists the temptation to provide neat conclusions.
This is ultimately a psychological mystery about one of the most mysterious relationships human beings have, the decision to try and share a life with another and make it work. “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.”
I was completely absorbed by this book. I keep going back to the empty hotel, the sparse, ravaged landscape, the quest for answers, the sadness that surrounds the end of a marriage. Kitamura has written a novel that is profound in its examination of marriage, and haunting in its staying power.
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 229 pages
Genre: Fiction, Mystery
Themes: Marriage
Commitment: A short book, as mesmerizing as it is profound
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