intimacies book review lucy caldwell

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Book Review: Intimacies

Short stories don’t number among my favourite genres: I like to be really immersed in a book, to read big chunks in one go. I hate reading more than one book at once but reading a continuous stream of short stories makes me feel distracted and restless, like I am consuming too much information at once. I’m yet to find my optimum way of reading short stories, but I’m determined to keep trying, because I feel like ignoring short story collections would be to ignore some of the sharpest prose, nuanced insights, and clever characterisation in contemporary literature. Or maybe I’m just saying that because I enjoyed Lucy Caldwell’s Intimacies so much.

When I saw Intimacies featured in The Guardian ‘s round-up of books published in 2020, I immediately knew that I wanted to read it, and I was so pleased when Faber & Faber sent me along a proof copy. I feel like I would have definitely given this five stars had I been a habitual reader of short story collections, but as I rarely (if ever) connect to short stories in the same way as I do novels, Intimacies can only ever be a strong four stars. But what a good short story collection! Lucy Caldwell’s stories are so expertly crated and offer such beautiful insight into the lives of her characters. The observations here are excellent, and the sparse but simple prose really allows the characterisation to shine. My favourite stories were ‘Like This’, ‘Mayday’, ‘People Tell You Everything’ and ‘Lady Moon’. (I don’t want to say anything about the premise of the stories because I enjoyed delving into them so much!) Running through the collection are the constant themes of the (Northern) Irish diaspora and motherhood, interspersed with musings on city life and feeling lost and the different paths people take in life. I’m loath to make a comparison to Sally Rooney, not least because Lucy Caldwell was writing before Sally Rooney was ever published, but if you like the latter’s razor-sharp depiction of relationships, then I think you’ll like Lucy Caldwell’s writing. They have the same precision of thought, the same deceptively spare prose. I will definitely be revisiting this very accomplished collection at some point, and I will definitely be reading more of her writing.

Has anyone read any of Lucy Caldwell’s books? I’d love to hear from you if you have!

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I'm Rachel, a writer, bookseller and recent creative writing graduate! I mainly blog about books and travel. You can follow my blog at www.whatracheldidblog.wordpress.com. :) View all posts by Rachel - What Rachel Did

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Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell — monumental moments

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Book Review: Intimacies – Lucy Caldwell

Posted June 21, 2021 in Arts and Culture , Book Review

Intimacies  

Lucy Caldwell

Eleven more stories from Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell on what it means to be a woman; stories of trying to find one’s place in the world; stories of heartbreaks and mistakes; secrets from friends and (mis)trust of strangers; frivolities of youth and anxieties of motherhood, and vice versa. From a young mother, husband away and mind racing in the dark, to a frightened student swallowing abortion pills bought illegally online; from a hopeful, nostalgic walk through Belfast streets on Christmas Eve, to a long-haul flight where alternative lives are imagined for a time, these are stories of love and getting lost, of home and exile, of existing in the liminal space of both here and elsewhere.

The opening story, ‘Like This’, evokes the fears and madness of motherhood – a theme which arises throughout the collection – exploring dark spaces of the mind where what might have happened happens, and what might have been, is. Then, ‘Mayday’, a girl’s fearful fight for her right to choose – dissolving tablets under her tongue, alone in a university bedroom – before abortion was made legal in Ireland in 2018; and a few pages later, in ‘Jars of Clay’, another young woman’s struggle with the realisation that the morals she was raised with might not be self-evident after all, that homemade banners might not describe every human life. Finally, in the titular story, ‘Intimacies’, Caldwell writes a letter to a child that never was – to us too, perhaps – imparting tender life lessons and hesitant confessions of things they – we – ought to know. She gives us “ Intimacies … catafalque, charism, eavesdropping … holy of holies, infinitude, intertwine … jubilate, tantamount, tantivy, unfurl. ” She gives us “these words and all of the words…All things, everything, at once.”

“Stories of heartbreaks and mistakes; secrets from friends and (mis)trust of strangers; frivolities of youth and anxieties of motherhood, and vice versa”

Read in one sitting – an almost-thirty woman curled up in an armchair in a hotel room, thinking about how she should be at work; how her mother thinks she should be a mother herself by now; how absurd it is to feel guilt for not having things she’s not sure she wants anyway – I see myself mirrored in these stories, in these women who could be my dearest friends, or simply strangers on the tube whose lives cross with my own for the moment our eyes meet. I know I will think of them often; I will return to their stories, in the intimacy of being alone with each one, away from the rush of that first, heady reading. Guided by the ghosts of Monica Lewinsky, Caroline Norton, Sinéad O’Connor, I know instinctively that the women in these stories would understand me too, somehow, because they don’t seem like fiction at all.

And it is in this reality, the keenness of feeling these stories – these intimacies – evoke, that the genius of this new collection from Caldwell lies. For she is not trying to be clever, there is no smart point to be made, except that these stories we live through hurt sometimes, and they are beautiful; that these words on the page, this moment here, for someone somewhere, is real life.

Words: Hannah Clarkson

Listen to Lucy in conversation on RTE’s Arena here .

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Review: Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures by Caroline Magennis, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

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• Irish Writing Arts & Humanities 100%
• Intimacy Arts & Humanities 84%
• Pleasure Arts & Humanities 73%
• Reproductive Rights Arts & Humanities 23%
• Irish Women Arts & Humanities 22%
• Motherhood Arts & Humanities 22%
• Spell Arts & Humanities 18%
• Remake Arts & Humanities 18%

T1 - Review: Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures by Caroline Magennis, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

AU - Baker, Timothy

PY - 2023/6/16

Y1 - 2023/6/16

N2 - Lucy Caldwell’s Intimacies: Eleven More Stories (2021) movingly charts the lives of young Northern Irish women. While Multitudes, her previous collection, focuses largely on children and adolescents, Intimacies tells a number of stories of motherhood and reproductive rights, largely centred on women in their twenties and thirties. The final, title story consists of seven sections, narrated by a mother to her unborn child. At the end she speaks of ‘[t]his private place achieved against the public odds; achieved and in a sense guaranteed because of them’, and claims that the words she gives her child are a ‘spell’ to make ‘now’ an ‘always’ (Caldwell 2021: 154–5). As Caroline Magennis writes in her beautiful, important new monograph, Caldwell’s stories in this collection show ‘how we navigate the tensions of intimacy between this holding-close and letting-go, and across the breadth of our intimate lives’ (61). Caldwell’s collection, like the other texts Magennis discusses, reframes and remakes questions of intimacy, the relations between public and private, and the forms of bodily connection we share.

AB - Lucy Caldwell’s Intimacies: Eleven More Stories (2021) movingly charts the lives of young Northern Irish women. While Multitudes, her previous collection, focuses largely on children and adolescents, Intimacies tells a number of stories of motherhood and reproductive rights, largely centred on women in their twenties and thirties. The final, title story consists of seven sections, narrated by a mother to her unborn child. At the end she speaks of ‘[t]his private place achieved against the public odds; achieved and in a sense guaranteed because of them’, and claims that the words she gives her child are a ‘spell’ to make ‘now’ an ‘always’ (Caldwell 2021: 154–5). As Caroline Magennis writes in her beautiful, important new monograph, Caldwell’s stories in this collection show ‘how we navigate the tensions of intimacy between this holding-close and letting-go, and across the breadth of our intimate lives’ (61). Caldwell’s collection, like the other texts Magennis discusses, reframes and remakes questions of intimacy, the relations between public and private, and the forms of bodily connection we share.

UR - https://c21.openlibhums.org/article/id/7906/

U2 - 10.16995/c21.7906

DO - 10.16995/c21.7906

M3 - Book/Film/Article review

SN - 2045-5216

JO - C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings

JF - C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings

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ebook ∣ Winner of the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award

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Lucy Caldwell

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by Katie Kitamura

Reviewed by greg chase.

With Intimacies, her fourth novel, Katie Kitamura cements her status as one of contemporary fiction’s most controlled and perceptive writers, particularly when it comes to ambiguities of language and the risks of miscommunication. The novel’s unnamed first-person narrator has just moved to The Hague, where she works as an interpreter for a court clearly based on (though never explicitly identified as) the International Criminal Court. Her job is to translate testimony from one language into another in real time. As she recognizes, there’s something inherently contradictory about this work: legal proceedings demand “extreme precision,” whereas “great chasms” exist between the expressive possibilities of one language and those of another. The narrator is meant to be an “instrument” who facilitates legal proceedings, but her turns of phrase, as well as her affect and tone, can influence the outcome of a trial.

The novel hits its stride about a third of the way through, when the narrator is assigned to work with a team of lawyers defending an unspecified West African country’s ex-president, who has been accused of ethnic cleansing after a contested election. The accused comes off as scornful of the court and bored by the deliberations of his defense team, yet oddly attuned to the narrator’s presence. He frequently “nod[s]” at her during court sessions, “[a]s if to recognize the work that I performed.”

Meanwhile, the narrator struggles to find her footing in The Hague. She has one friend, a curator of Serbian-Ethiopian descent, and she is in a relationship with a married man who may or may not be in the process of separating permanently from his wife. We learn little about the narrator’s past, other than the fact that her father is dead, she is an only child, and her mother, with whom she is “not in the habit of regularly speaking,” now lives in Singapore. She has “native fluency in English and Japanese from my parents, and in French from a childhood in Paris.”

Through this dislocated narrator, Kitamura offers a fresh take on the relationship between the personal and the political. Set during the run-up to the Brexit referendum—and with concerns about the American presidential election hovering in the background— Intimacies explores how far one should seek to understand proponents of isolationism and intolerance. (At one point, during a commotion in the courtroom, the judge sternly instructs the former president, “ Please control your supporters, ” a line that will resonate with readers in chilling new ways after the events of January 6, 2021.)

In Kitamura’s hands, the narrator’s cosmopolitanism shades into moral relativism, a constitutional inability to make strong judgments or take decisive action. She is quick to recognize legitimate criticisms of the court, such as the fact that it “had primarily investigated and made arrests in African countries, even as crimes against humanity proliferated around the world.” More troublingly, she finds herself secretly rooting for the former president, “flinch[ing] when the proceedings seemed to go against him,” feeling that “of all the people in the city [ … ] [he] was the person I knew best.” It is as though the numerous languages she hears spoken around her have crowded out her sense of self.

Intimacies has its shortcomings. The scenes outside the court, which typically consist of the narrator having dinner or attending some sort of event with one of the novel’s secondary characters, can drag. Despite the intriguing political and philosophical questions it raises, Intimacies focuses on a relatively small group of cultured, upper-middle class characters and shows only a cursory interest in portraying other elements of Dutch society.

But Kitamura has a real gift for tone. She infuses seemingly mundane events—staying in someone else’s apartment, encountering the same person in two different contexts—with a powerful sense of dread. She calls to mind W. G. Sebald in her portrayal of the finite nature of human perspective as a kind of chronic confusion, a thick and inescapable “cloud of unknowing.”

Intimacies looks back on the political and cultural chaos of the last decade and wonders what kinds of epistemological and moral certainties remain available to us. It is more concerned with raising these questions than with attempting to offer clear answers; it is, in other words, a successful novel: subtle, carefully constructed, and not easily reducible to any kind of coherent political position.

Published on October 26, 2021

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Intimacies exquisitely charts the steps and missteps of young women trying to find their place in the world. From a Belfast student ordering illegal drugs online to end an unwanted pregnancy to a young mother’s brush with mortality; from a Christm...

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