Katie Kitamura's INTIMACIES is character driven, and that’s good. She is a fine writer, and I loved her paragraphs. But I cannot rate this book highly because, it seemed to me, it is without plot.

I normally describe the story when I review a book. In this case, though, I could not figure it out. There are several things going on with the nameless narrator, an interpreter working in The Hague, but what’s the point?

Worse yet, INTIMACIES is hard to read. Kitamura uses commas all over the place when a semicolon or a period would be appropriate. Also, she uses no quotation marks, even when more than one person is speaking in a single paragraph.

Punctuation marks were invented to aid readability. When an author does not use punctuation marks or uses them incorrectly, she is being rude to her readers.

The book is short. Otherwise, I could not have finished it.