This review by Vanessa Francesca in The Age is near unintelligible. I’ve pasted a few paras below. She must be a graduate of Melbourne University. Technical manuals for Stealth Bombers make more sense.

FICTION: Intimacies, Katie Kitamura, Jonathan Cape, $32.99

“Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies is an existential thriller with a shadow text about the systems, the narratives, and the ambiguities that position the way we relate to each other and the way we see ourselves. The American writer – who has authored three novels, including A Separation – renders the intricacies of human relationships with the lustre and soulfulness of a Dutch painter.

Katie Kitamura’s novel demonstrates that stories themselves are equal parts light and shadow.

As in Rembrandt’s paintings, subtlety is key to Kitamura’s achievements. She brings her talent for imagery and close reading of relationships to the story of an unnamed translator in an unnamed court in The Hague.

Intimacies makes elegant architecture of the unmissable spectre of colonialism. Kitamura is a writer who can create large shadows from the smallest of objects and her plotting provides an object lesson in the ambiguity of human relationships.

When the colonialism theme arrives it is dramatised in a painting by the 17th-century Dutch artist Judith Leyster, whose The Propositioncomes to stand for the ambiguous and sometimes fraught power relations in the book – between genders, races, and classes.

The painting represents “two irreconcilable subjective positions: the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardour and seduction, and the woman, who had been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation”. This schism echoes several of the book’s themes and contrasts. The power relations can be read as between nations and states, rather than only between men and women.”

Katie Kitamura’s novel, Intimacies…

Existential? Like Sartre, Camus or simply existing?

Shadow text? What the hell is that?

Elegant architecture? Fuck me dead…

I don’t mean to be hard on Ms Francesca but there’s a readership out there who really want to know if this is a good book and if so, in simple terms, why? If not, tell ‘em to save their $32.99 and tell ‘em why. It ain’t rocket science.