Separation (Kitamura)

A Separation
Katie Kitamura, 2017
Penguin Publishing
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399576102


Summary
This is her story.

About the end of her marriage. About what happened when Christopher went missing and she went to find him. These are her secrets, this is what happened...
 
A young woman has agreed with her faithless husband: it's time for them to separate. For the moment it's a private matter, a secret between the two of them.

As she begins her new life, she gets word that Christopher has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged south of Greece; she reluctantly agrees to go look for him, still keeping their split to herself.

In her heart, she's not even sure if she wants to find him. As her search comes to a shocking breaking point, she discovers she understands less than she thought she did about her relationship and the man she used to love.

A searing, suspenseful story of intimacy and infidelity, A Separation lays bare what divides us from the inner lives of others. With exquisitely cool precision, Katie Kitamura propels us into the experience of a woman on edge, with a fiercely mesmerizing story to tell. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1979
• Where—California, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; Ph.D. London Consortium
• Awards—
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


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Book Reviews
In the hierarchical world of Kitamura’s novel, there is little love or friendship between equals, only manipulation and control, guilt and obedience, humiliation and submission. And behind these power games, one detects an overriding fatalism about the possibility of human connection, a sense that "wife and husband and marriage are only words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than perhaps can be contained in a handful of syllables, or any amount of writing." It is this radical disbelief — a disbelief, it appears, even in the power of art—that makes Kitamura’s accomplished novel such a coolly unsettling work.
Fernanda Eberstadt - New York Times Book Review

[An] intimate, psychological mystery (Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2017).
Paul S. Makishima - Boston Globe


Kitamura…leaves plot issues unresolved. Instead, she focuses on capturing a disarray of contradictory emotions, delineating the line between white lies and betrayal.… Despite the mysterious premise, readers may find that the narrator’s frequent contemplation frustratingly stalls the novel.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [A] tautly austere, intensely internal narrative, both adroitly lyrical and jarring. For readers seeking profound examinations of challenging relationships…Kitamura's oeuvre will be a compelling discovery. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Library Journal


At once cool and burning, Kitamura’s immersive, probing psychological tale benefits from its narrator’s precise observations and nimble use of language.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Dread and lassitude twist into a spare and stunning portrait of a marital estrangement.… [T]he narrator suggests that "perhaps wife and husband and marriage itself are only words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than can be contained in a handful of syllables."
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Separation...then take off on your own... :

1. What kind of woman is the narrator of the book—how would you describe her? Why do you think the author decided not to give her a name? At one point the narrator tells us about her work as a literary translator: "translation's potential for passivity appealed to me." What does that statement say about her?

2. When Christopher's mother calls wondering where he is, why doesn't the narrator tell her mother-in-law that the two have gone their separate ways? What holds her back from sharing this information? And why does she decide to head to Greece in search of him, even though she is reluctant to do so?

3. What atmosphere does the Greek village of Gerolimenas convey? Consider the blackened hills and empty hotels, the faceless saints and stray dogs. How does this setting help create the novel's mood? And what is that mood?

4. What was your reaction when you learned where Christopher was? Were you shocked?

5. What do we learn about the narrator and Christopher's relationship: it's beginning, middle, and it's ultimate end? What kind of emotional harm have they inflicted on one another? In what ways do you discern the narrator's hidden (repressed?) anger despite her outwardly detached personae?

6. What do you make of Christopher? Katie Kitamura never gives him the opportunity to speak for himself. Mostly, what we get of him comes through an unflattering portrait presented to us by the narrator. Is she a reliable, or fair, judge of her husband?

7. As she finds herself on the shore of the Mediterranean, the narrator muses about men's proclivity for infidelity:

Now, they no longer went away—there was not, at least for most of them, a sea to roam or a desert to cross, there was nothing but the floors of an office tower, the morning commute, a familiar and monotonous landscape…it was only on the shores of infidelity that they achieved a little privacy, a little inner life.

Does that mean she forgives Christopher his incessant straying?

8. Follow-up to Question 7: What other ruminations on marriage does the narrator engage in? In her view, for instance, what does marriage mean to wives that it does not, or cannot, mean to husbands? Do you have any thoughts about...well, the narrator's thoughts? What are your thoughts surrounding marriage?

9. Discuss the narrator's final encounter with her in-laws and what she comes to realize about their marriage? How did she see them at first, and how does she see the two in light of her own failed relationship?

10. What does the novel's title, "Separation," refer to? How many kinds of separation are there in this story?

11. What does the narrator come away having learned? Has she changed by the novel's end? What do you predict for the new relationship she is returning home to?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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