The Appeal of Passivity: Katie Kitamura’s A Separation (2017)

In today’s episode, Anna-Lena Schmidt, Jonathan Möck, and Vanessa Wohlfeil try to come to terms with Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel A Separation. We talk about tourism, class conflicts, and unreliable narration.

In A Separation, we follow a female translator to Greece where she is to find her husband from whom she is attempting to get a divorce. This plot about a failed marriage turns into a mystery thriller, as the husband turns up dead in rural Greece, the predominant setting of the novel. But rather than being a clichéd crime novel, what follows is a mediation marriage, infidelity, loss, and mourning.

Kitamura’s third novel received enthusiastic blurbs from fellow writers, such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Kushner, Jenny Offill, and Rivka Galchen. Her writing echoes the talents of Han Kang, Hiroko Oyamada, and Claire Messud. Her latest novel, Intimacies, was featured on a list of book recommendations by Barack Obama for the summer of 2021.

music & sounds by: Axl Rhodes, listen to "Netrunner" in full!

find the LITHUB article here: https://lithub.com/katie-kitamura-on-subverting-tropes-in-a-separation/