it’s almost funny that with the title of the book what’s lacking or hardest to find in the book is intimacy. 

the book has beautiful almost poetic points about language and it’s use age. how we talk, what we say and how it translates and is translated… all that was beautiful and honestly the most intimate moments of the entire book. 

the rest of the story -which means most of the book -felt very distant and separated into too many different smaller individual stories that didn’t really feel connected and didn’t come together to give the feeling of a complete book. 

there was the narrator - an unnamed woman that moved to the netherlands for work and because she fells a bit lost in her life. but the love doesn’t help her. and in many aspects i felt like the narrator was even more lost at the end of the story than the beginning. 

but we had the narrator and her personal struggles of trying to figure out who she is and where she belongs, what she should do and all of that.

than there is this storyline between her and a friend she made that for some unexplained reason gets a bit distanced after someone gets brutally beaten up near the friends home. 

than there is the “romantic” section between the narrator and a man named aidaan, but that gets strangely distant fast as well.

than for some unexplained reason another woman is added who turns out to be the sister of the guy who was brutally beaten up near the narrators friends apartment earlier in the story. so her and the beaten up brother are also added into the mix. why? no clue! what did they bring into the book? nothing in my opinion. 


there are the mentions of work colleges and situations with that and a very strange situation between her and a lawyer she translates for.  


this book is strange. 

it had many different elements that all don’t really work together as they are. 

but in an almost ironic way they create a story that tells t complete opposite story of what the title suggests: no intimacy at all. 

everything is kept so distant and spread ihr, unfinished and just mentioned it almost fell ihr like something was dropped along the way for no reason at all. 

the open ending of what will happen now doesn’t help. 

it’s not a bad book and it certainly one that will be fantastic for people to discuss and have lots to talk about in for example book clubs or classes. 

but just as a pleasure reader reading this book? i felt a bit disappointed and wish this book would have just focused on one or two specific topics and stuck with those. for example the narrators job and her life where she’s at and her unsure romantic entanglements with aidaan. that would have been an entire book worth of stories to tell. 

this it was a strange read that had great moments, very strange ones and moments that made no sense and i do not get why they were even in the book at all.


overall it’s mostly a book about language. 
in the  specific way it was written and characters talked, as well as that one of the topics the book is translating and languages. 
and because of that the title and how it’s told and what it tells makes some sense. 

i think that if you’re interested in this book, give it a try! might be just what your looking for. 

just if your someone that wants clear topics and specific story telling? this isn’t the book for you