Everything is Temporary
The story being told in this novel is filled with relationships and incidents which are temporary. The narrator’s very job as translator at the World Court begins with the understanding that it is only to be a temporary position. By the end she will be offered a permanent situation but the stresses faced by the narrator compel her to make it temporary by her own design. Personal relationships are in constant state of flux. Multiple characters are married but engaging in affairs which make even the separations temporary before a reconciliation which can be predicted to become temporary. Life, the story says, is a connection of temporary circumstances which seem to have any permanent connection only to the person living it. This aspect of the theme is framed as first-person narration in the present tense.
Happiness Requires Interpretation
The narrator is a translator for the Court who must deal with cases involving crimes such as genocide. Translation is not merely finding a synonym for a word in two different languages. It requires intense interpretation of the meaning of a word before it can be accurately translated. The narrator’s personal life is a mess because she is not as adept at interpreting the language of behavior as she is in her job. On a larger scale, she misinterprets the true feelings of a man with whom she is having an affair. On a lesser scale she misinterprets a single snatch of conversation between that man and a close female friend. Over the course of the story, the translator becomes more and more discontented with her life because the challenges presented by interpreting social interactions.
The Search for Self-Identity
The narrator is attempting to find herself a permanent home in The Hague only to find, of course, that everything is temporary. She becomes the mistress of a married man and moves into his luxurious home when the wife leaves to live with her own lover. This places the narrator in the persona of the role of the wife but she cannot accept that identity because his promises to break off things with his wife go unfulfilled. The narrator’s job as translator requires that she project a sense of neutral dissociation even as she is translating horrific stories of violence committed without remorse. Ultimately, the challenge to her establishing a strong sense of self-identity dissolves into a presentation of form as content when the use of the first-person pronoun for her own narrator becomes conflated with the testimony of others. This technique makes it difficult to determine who is the “I” in the narration.
