Katie Kitamura interview

Gone to the Forest is Katie Kitamura’s second novel, about a family and the cost of European colonization in an unknown time and place.

Tom and his father live on a farm in a country that recalls, at first and most often, J.M Coetzee’s South Africa. It is on the brink of civil war. The novel opens with a broadcast by the land’s natives, which Tom overhears on a radio that has been left, eerily, on the homestead’s verandah.

The men’s strained relationship is compounded when a sly young woman, Carine, comes to live with them. Their sinister dealings with each other, the other white farmers and servants expose the fissures of a hard and unforgiving society, which threaten to engulf them all.

Kitamura writes with fine tension and clipped grace. Her observations are subtle and sharp. The volcano’s importance in the story evokes Aimé Césaire’s poem Corps Perdu, which begins ‘Moi, qui Krakatoa…’ and is a soaring command, in the wake of decolonization, for ‘the islands to be’.