Intimacies

“I had lived with my slow-moving grief for so long that I had ceased to notice it, or recognize how it blunted my feeling. But now it began to lift. A space opened up.”

In this passage, the narrator describes her feelings as she prepares to move from New York to The Hague. Her words stand as a response to her father’s death and her mother’s return to Singapore. She recognizes that her grief temporarily prevents her from making decisions, and the use of figurative language conveys the relief she feels when the grief lifts and she can finally see a way forward.

“I’d begun to think the docile surface of the city concealed a more complex and contradictory nature.”

The complexity of The Hague becomes a metaphor for the narrator and for the entire narrative as the book explores the layers that exist within everything in life. The Hague maintains a façade of orderliness and control, yet the narrator senses a sinister undercurrent in the city. In the same way, every person she meets appears to be concealing something just below the surface.

“[T]here were great chasms beneath words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning. As interpreters it was our job to throw down planks across these gaps.”

The figurative language in this passage compares the act of interpretation to sealing up cracks or building bridges. The narrator understands that her job isn’t just to translate one language to another, for she must also make sure to preserve as much meaning as possible is preserved in the translation: a job as tricky and potentially dangerous as laying planks across a chasm.