I read this on a train journey, and it’s a great novel for that situation: short, unsettling, and focusing on a character who is unmoored. It is set in The Hague and succeeds in building up an uneasy atmosphere in which violence is always just outside the frame. The protagonist/narrator is a court interpreter and I found the descriptions of her work (and her ambivalence about it) very compelling.

However, the narrator is also trying to work out whether she’s in love with a married man who can’t decide whether to leave his wife. This strand could have intertwined well with the themes of language and underlying violence in the novel, if the married guy weren’t so boring! I didn’t have a sense of what real “intimacy” with him might mean. Maybe it was intentional that he seemed so ungraspable - altogether, the writing is so measured and controlled that everything in the novel has an intentional feel to it - but the other central figures all have far more charisma, and each has a threatening edge.