A Separation

I really struggled with the number of stars to give this book. Though the prose is beautiful and there are some very moving passages on the nature of grief and relationships, I found myself wondering when it would be over. Katie Kitamura has a unique voice and though I never wanted to abandon the book completely, I also didn't find myself counting the minutes until I could pick it up again.

Meh. An unnamed narrator is so passive that she lets her estranged husband tell her not to tell anyone they're separated. The she lets her mother in law send her to Greece to track the husband down because he is not answering his mother's phone calls and she feels she can't break her word not to tell her husband's mother that they are separated.

The narrator also tends to imagine what is going on in the minds of the people she observes and assume that she imagined correctly.

The narrative is written with commas in many places where there should be periods, which I found distracting.

Finally, the blurbs I've seen for this book make it sound like a thriller or a suspense story. Don't be fooled. It's not.

It started with the romance novels, but I've begun telling Matt about all my books - the characters, the plots, what's happening where I am now, and now, and now.

“It's about a couple that's in the process of divorcing,” I said.
“Uplifting!” he said.

Later, "They just found the husband's body in a ravine," I said."Was it the wife?" he asked."I don't know yet," I said. "There's also a jealous other woman.""Of course there's a jealous other woman!"

Of course, that makes this sound much more thriller-y than it actually is. Even though there are a few other central characters - the unnamed narrator's in-laws, a hotel concierge, and a driver that shuttles her across the Greek village - most of it is the narrator speculating on their interior lives, what they must be thinking and feeling as the story slowly unfolds. And it is slow. Her hopefully-soon-to-be-ex is only present in the periphery of the book; we never see his point of view, just an increasingly disappointing picture of a marriage that might have been doomed from the start, and yet the fact that they are separated is a secret that he has asked her to keep and that she feels obligated to keep even after his death. The Greek setting doesn't offer up much beauty either, it is a harsh landscape that recently experienced devastating fires, and it's a fitting setting.

I'm not sure what to think about this, overall. It wasn't quite as tightly constructed as her later Intimacies, which I thought was excellent, but I still enjoyed sinking into Kitamura's words. (Do I wish for some quotation marks? Maybe, sometimes, but that's not a deal-breaker for me. It might be for you.)

Audio recordings of books have such power to influence our reading. The narrator of this novel took such a flat and almost affectless tone in the narration–one I might not have been able to conjure up on my own as the narrator's voice. But I think that the audio version makes very clear the emotional limbo of the narrator (whose name, I don't think we ever even learn) and how the story of her separation and then trip to Greece to find her husband is something that happens to her, rather than something she actively participates in.
Some of the more literary moments in the text are quite beautiful; the thread about professional mourners vs. those who are too close to their grief is particularly poignant; and thoughts on death and what it means for those left behind permeate the book. It is a slow tale but kind of lovely. I am not sorry I read it, even though, as I told one of the book club members, it certainly gives the reader ample opportunity to exercise their “judgment muscles” in terms of judging the characters on their motives and actions.

How does a 220 book take forever to read and still underwhelm you with poor writing and an inability to use punctuation (much needed!!!) or present dialogue? If you're wondering, get this book!

All snark aside, this book was awful. After the first 60ish pages, in which some suspense is built while a truly boring woman wandering around a hotel wondering where her nearly-ex-husband is, we have to listen to ramble and whine on and on and NO ONE CARES. A book to be skipped.