But Sudeikis tries to listen to the universe, even in unlikely circumstances, and for whatever reason the character stuck around in his head. So, in time, Sudeikis developed and pitched a series with the same setup—Ted, in England, far from his family, a stranger in a strange land learning a strange game—that Apple eventually bought. But when we next saw Ted Lasso, he had changed. He wasn't loud or obnoxious anymore; he was simply…human. He was a man in the midst of a divorce who missed his son in America. The new version of Ted Lasso was still funny, but now in an earned kind of way, where the jokes he told and the jokes made at his expense spoke to the quality of the man. He had become an encourager, someone who thrills to the talents and dreams of others. He was still ignorant at times, but now he was curious too.
With a lot of overlap, it’s hard to say what’s comical and what’s in earnest — but there’s enough of both to keep a reader happily engaged, and, because the author has lived in Namibia, there are plenty of probably true facts to savor about the landscape and quirks of language and expat behavior. That is to say, here’s the disclaimer the novel should have come with: Don’t take this book too seriously, and it will entertain you, seriously.
On the surface, it’s a tight and terse mystery with a decisive protagonist. But it’s also a piercing commentary on mother-daughter relationships, the indignity of bureaucracy, the burdens of caregiving and the impositions of religious dogma on women. A woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy in a conservative and deeply Catholic society ends up being a key component of this story.
All novels are, in a sense, about language, but “Intimacies” presses down on how meaning is made, and how it is compromised. Kitamura takes note of what she calls the “great chasms beneath words,” chasms that “could open up without warning.”
At once a memoir, a personal essay about loneliness, an exploration of the science of solitude and its effects, and an invitation to come together in a world built to separate us, Seek You looks at isolation as a problem and investigates where it comes from, how it shapes us, and why we should battle against it.
Let me refer to myself in glorious ways:
Colors seem brighter, the sky is a shocking blue.