The writing has a great potential, but the characters look like puppets moving without heads through the entire story. Which story is also ambigous and not going anywhere, although it has a potential too. I cannot say it is a book that 'I like', or 'I don't like'. It is just one of those books I wished it was just getting better until the end.

<p>Ah, rich people problems. To have a flat in London, sitting unoccupied. To jet off to Greece at the behest of a relative, and on a moment's notice, because work, what's that? To stay in a fancy Greek hotel, eating out at restaurants, and sure, it's the off-season, but really? Come on.</p>

<p>And here we are, trapped inside the head of our nameless narrator, who, separated from her husband, still goes to Greece at her mother-in-law's order, to find him. Her thoughts are banal because, like most people, her thoughts are banal and not in need of having every single on detailed. Her husband is rich and a playboy, and they separated because of his numerous infidelities, and I have used <i>banal</i> twice already but it is so <i>banal</i> and we have two hundred pages plus of this banality of our cipher narrator searching after her cipher husband with cipher locals poking about and there is absolutely nothing there. I can tell you nothing about the narrator or her personality or her likes and dislikes. Ditto everyone else in the book. Ditto why this woman would undertake this task. Ditto why this book got such accolades (amazon tells me <i>Named a best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, Refinery29, Town & Country, Harper's Bazaar, NYLON, BookRiot.</i>). Obviously, there are far worse written books out there, but this is just a flat, monotone where I don't care about anything, at all, ever. </p>

<p><A href="https://www.librarything.com/work/18298900/book/150095604">A Separation</a> by Katie Kitamura went on sale March 23, 2017.</p>

<p><small>I received a copy free from <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> in exchange for an honest review.</small></p>

A Separation fascinated me from the moment I saw it. Relationships are incredibly so interesting, the way people change during the course of them, how we lie and misunderstand. We all strive after relationships, after being close with other people, finding someone who we belong to and who belongs to us. So when the chance to read A Separation materialised, I jumped at it. Thanks to Clerkenwell Press and Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

We meet our unnamed narrator at the end of her relationship. They have decided to separate and are now floating in that space between on and off, married and divorced, together and apart. For a while now they haven't seen each other and our narrator has, in a sense moved on with her life. And yet this separation isn't final, no one has spoken yet of divorce although she is pretty sure she wants it. They haven't even told anyone yet that they are separated, it is a secret, shamefully kept private. In that situation a call arrives from her (still) mother-in-law who demands she flies to Greece to find her (still) husband. And she says yes. Because how can she not when no one knows, when she is technically still a wife and when she needs to talk to him anyway. And from there a constant conflict begins within her between duty and freedom. A Separation is about how things end, how we let go and how maybe sometimes we can't.

It's strangely difficult to put A Separation down. Kitamura crafts a narrative that intrigues and makes the reader desperate to know more. What happens to people when they separate, what happens when people lose each other? Because Kitamura's narrator is unnamed, while everyone else is named, you feel the erasure of self that exists in her, and many other relationships. She exists in relation to others. We get to know her based on how she interacted with her husband, her parents-in-law, friends, but we also see her struggling with defining herself as an individual. We are in her head but we are also outside of it. The lack of clarity, the confusion of emotions, it is very recognisable for anyone who has been in a relationship or has had a relationship end. Although marketed as a mystery, I wouldn't really classify A Separation as such. It is a psychological book, a book about humans and emotions. There will be moments of realisation similar to a mystery novel, but they won't be about the plot, but rather about what the events of the plot reveal to you about yourself, about humans. It's also a sad book, tragic, but also beautiful in its own way. You're in a character's head and like you're own head, you can never be quite sure where it's going. But the journey is always interesting.

Katie Kitamura strikes a very impressive balance in A Separation, writing an engrossing novel in a very passive voice. We don't really know her main character, she responds rather than acts, and dialogue isn't set apart with quotation marks. As such, reading A Separation isn't always as easy as reading other books is. You have to work on it, you have to dig into the narrator and see who she is, what she wants. In a way Kitamura here echoes the process of forging a relationship. It is difficult to know who people are, what they hide away, what they're not telling you. So you have to go into it with trust and goodwill, mining every small detail for meaning. She is investigating herself and her emotions, and so are we. I loved this about A Separation because the reader is as much a passive observer of the narrator's relationship as she is in that moment. We are both trying to understand what happened, and how it happened. And there is no perfect, happy end to that query.

I adored A Separation and couldn't put it down. I was drawn into Kitamura's narrator's mind and found myself caring. I also realised I was investigating myself as her narrator investigated herself. A Separation is a special book, but also one that is probably not for everyone. I'd recommend it to readers interested in Literary Fiction.

A novel packed with beautiful observational prose which probes the essence of emotional integrity

A wonderful novel containing inspired prose which flows flawlessly. The pages seem to fly by as we venture on a journey to declare separation which leads to unexpected death and widowhood.
The author's writing style is different: all speech is narrated through the first person, Christopher's wife. She is a translator but seemingly useless when it comes to expressing her own thoughts out loud. They remain in her head or are expressed through writing. Indeed her career as a translator absolves the narrator of self expression. The novel examines the durability or otherwise of relationships and compromises that often have to be made along the way.
The story is simple: Christopher's wife travels to Greece to advise her estranged husband of only 5 years that she wants a divorce. But when she arrives she finds her husband is missing and days later he is found dead presumed murdered. Christopher's wife suspects hotel staff know more about the murder than they admit. However, any suspicions she has are locked away and only we as readers are privy to her thoughts. Her own position is compromised by a relationship she is in with Yvan, a one time friend of Christopher. Kitamura is amazing with some excellent observational prose.
The storyline is set amongst a background of wanton destruction - grass fires set by arsonists compare to the pointless loss of life of her husband. Isabella and Mark, Christopher's parents, are cold in emotions and yet we are forced to empathise with their loss as they grieve the loss of their only child.
An exceptionally good contemporary work of fiction, which explores emotions and self-expression. A delightful read. This is a relatively short novel and the reader is left questioning the durability and sentiment that underpin relationships.

3.5 Stars. The narrator receives an urgent call from her mother-in-law, wanting to know why her son Christopher isn't answering her calls during his travels in Greece. The narrator and her unfaithful husband have been separated for six months, but they've decided to keep it a secret for now. Rather than admit they've separated and that she isn't privy to her soon-to-be ex-husband's travels, the narrator agrees to travel to Greece and find him. The secret separation has complicated the narrator's life by causing her past and present to coexist. She intends to ask for a divorce when she finds him, but only his belongings are at the hotel. She decides to stay in Greece until he returns. The secret separation puts the narrator in a difficult spot and she considers dropping the pretense that they are still together.

I liked A Separation, but I might've liked it more if it were part of someone's memoir. I was underwhelmed by the story, even though I knew to expect more of a character piece than a suspenseful mystery. There was such an eerie, tense atmosphere, that I was unsatisfied when it was simply ruminations on marriage and the end of a relationship. The story is slow-moving and introspective. The narrator is well-educated and reserved, which made her feel distant. The writing is beautiful and insightful, but the style may be bothersome to some readers. There aren't any quotation marks to differentiate dialogue, but the conversations are in short bursts. The biggest impediment to my reading comfort were the sentences within sentences. Em dashes everywhere!

The narrator travels from her home in London to the small fishing village of Gerolimenas, Greece. There's an ominous feeling in the air. It's the offseason and the area was recently ravaged by wildfires, so there aren't many tourists. While waiting for her husband's return, the narrator visits a church covered by layers of graffiti. Each layer is painted by a new conqueror but the old layers are still visible, leaving an "extraordinary...record of conflict." There's tension between the tourists and the locals. The employees at the hotel seem to be holding something back from the narrator, with their strange looks and careful wording. My favorite part of any story tends to be the interactions between characters, but most of this story takes place in the narrator's head. She works as a literary translator and her understanding of the complexity of language also applies to her understanding of people and their actions. I really enjoyed the narrator's astute, sometimes uncomfortable, observations about relationships. She’s constantly observing the people around her, interpreting them through their body language and vocal intonations. She imagines what might be going on in their lives with an enormous amount of detail.

What led the narrator's previously happy marriage to this impasse? Alone at the hotel, she has plenty of time to think about the complexity of marital relationships and the undefined borders that result when a marriage ends. Despite everything that has happened between her and Christopher, she still feels a pull to him. She wonders how he will react when he sees her. Will he be apprehensive or hopeful? She explores the cruel gap between naive expectation at the beginning of a relationship and reality of living with another person long term. The end of her marriage makes her see the depth that aging and experience add to our perspective. She examines the roles of the mother, the wife, the mistresses in her husband's life. As more information about Christopher's life becomes known, she notices how "experience accumulated in haphazard places, the wrong bits of knowledge residing with the wrong parties." In her interactions with others, the unspoken social rules where "we pretend we do not know what we in fact do know" come into play. She's hyper aware of the illusions we uphold for the sake of others and ourselves. When the nature of her separation changes, all the pretending gets to be too much. She tries to properly portray her roles, but she second guesses her reactions and feels guilty for not behaving correctly.

In A Separation, things the narrator thought could never happen when she first met her husband actually occur. The telling was too cold and cerebral for my tastes, but it was a well-written look into the disintegration of a marriage. Many elements reminded me of other literary tales that feature dysfunctional marriages: The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty (woman travels to exotic locale after husband's betrayals, mostly in her head), Fates and Furies (ruminations on marriage), The Dinner (intellectual feel, uncomfortable observances), Listen to Me (tense atmosphere of a mystery, but actually a story about marriage).

This is a tedious book with no characterisation and little dialogue instead relying on observations from the observer's point of view. There are so many great books out there that after struggling with this one until I had read a fifth of it and continuing to be intensely bored, I gave up.

A Separation was not what I expected, but I ended up liking it once I got in the right head space. As described, this is a book about infidelity and a marriage that falls apart. But what surprised me was the way in which the topic is approached. It's a very subjective meditative piece written from the perspective of the unnamed wife. Following her recent separation from her husband Christopher, she is called upon by her mother in law to go find her ex on a Greek Island. Once there, the narrator pieces together what Christopher has been up to while reflecting on their marriage and her current circumstances. There's something almost cold in the way in which the narrator evaluates and assesses every interaction, thought and feeling. But the lack of sentimentality allows for some interesting complicated emotions and insights. And just when I thought that this was a novel in which not much happens, something big does happen and the story and perspective pivot dramatically. As I write this review, I've talked myself into a 4 star rating. This won't be for everyone -- I certainly didn't particularly like any of the characters-- but I felt myself drawn in and interested. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.

A quiet and subtle portrait of marriage, loss and grief.

I quite enjoyed this book but found it very long winded some of the time and to be fair was a little bit disappointed and not sure I would be the right person to recommend this book.

A book of two halves, in my opinion. Before the "event" I felt it flowed with an emotion relevant to the character but afterwards, the story ground to a halt. But maybe I've missed the point and there was nothing more to tell.

This is one of those books where the blurb grabs you and suddenly you find yourself rushing to start it.
Unfortunately, the excitement soon left when I began to read. Considering the short length of this book, it felt like much longer.
The unnamed narrator originally feels exciting, after all who doesn't love the new Mrs de Winter in du Maurier's classic, but unfortunately this narrator just did not do it for me. Stream of consciousness can be a really great thing in a novel but the reader is never really involved, we are at arms length and never truly feel any connection or inclusion. Her narration is overly analytical and jarring at times and I found myself wanting to skip ahead, but alas, even if you do skip ahead it is the same throughout the book.
The language is repetitive and at times overly descriptive. Sometimes a tree is just a tree.
The plot was minimal, and if a book is well executed, plot does not always matter, however when there is few redeeming factors in a book, it just fails as an enjoyable read.
I can see why people like the book, Kitamura can undoubtedly write well and for some, they might like the slow plod of the story, it was just not for me.

3.5

For anyone looking for "the next Gone Girl" ( a comparison I am getting very tired of at this stage), this isn't it. And it isn't a "literary Gone Girl" either. Critics need to come up with alternative means of describing emerging books about marriage containing female narrators. Okay, end of rant.

Katie Kitamura's third book, A Separation, is like the anti-mystery. We have all the right ingredients of a mystery (or thriller) - a dead body, evidence of a violent crime, a trail of clues, a couple of suspicious characters and a little queue of mourners - but we lack the tool needed to dig deeper for us. In this interesting take on a "murder mystery", nobody feels compelled to pursue the investigation. This novel seems to assume that some things, particularly about human nature, are best left unknown. This could be considered both a refreshing and interesting take on the genre, or a complete frustration.

This story opens with 30-ish woman accepting a phone call from her mother-in-law, Isabelle, inquiring after the whereabouts of her son, who has been on holidays in Greece but now isn't answering his phone. What Isabelle doesn't know (and is never told) is that our narrator and her son have been separated for six months and our narrator hasn't spoken to him in a month. Colour me intrigued. Despite all of this, our narrator agrees to go to Greece and try to locate him. After a few days at the hotel where he was staying, we discover that her husband, Christopher, is actually dead (this isn't really a spoiler, from how I read it).

As this novel unfolds, we learn more and more about Christopher, at the same time that our narrator does. Kitamura slowly unravels the other sides to him, very cleverly building a stunning meditation on marital estrangement, infidelity and the unknowability of one’s spouse. This is a sparse novel and while it is muted in its approach, it is constructed excellently, slowly unspooling in a cool and subtle manner.

I would consider this a psychological novel. Kitamura focuses on a spouse's "what if" ponderings as opposed to the "whodunit" element (the most pivotal being the narrator's examination of how her life and responsibilities in this grieving process would have played out differently if she had revealed to her in-laws that her and Christopher were separated). Kitamura pulls at strings that are never quite unravelled, leaving many an unanswered question. If you can handle this, A Separation makes for a very satisfying, if unsettling, read.