Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some great new paperbacks, from Booker-listed novels to reportage from Ukraine
The opening pages of Katie Kitamura’s fifth novel establish a nervy, fraught physicality. The narrator is meeting a man at a restaurant. She is anxious, hyper-vigilant.
Waiting at the table is a young man, Xavier, self-assured and faintly discomfiting. The meeting is edgy and awkward, rendered in a tapestry of small gestures. Initially, we wonder if we are being subjected to the prose equivalent of bad acting: a surfeit of fussy movement, signifying nothing – an impression heightened by the stumbling gait of the narrator’s run-on sentences.
But admirers of Kitamura’s previous novel, Intimacies, will recall the taut discipline of that book’s prose, and trust that, here, the language has been loosened by design. Sure enough, when the churn of movement and syntax is disrupted – appropriately, by the smallest of gestures – a deeper existential dread emerges. Xavier sits back, exhales. The narrator, with a sense of shock, recognises the movement as her own, “lifted from my films, my stage performances, and copied without shame. A piece of me, on the body of a stranger.” Xavier has studied her, she believes, then performed her back to herself.
