Lidija Haas in Harper's Magazine: One third of the way into Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel, A Separation, its narrator asks an elderly Greek woman to demonstrate a traditional funeral lamentation. This woman is a professional mourner (a “weeper”) who ululates on behalf of the region’s bereaved, people from whom, the narrator has heard, others “expect a good show. ” Her services are needed because “the nature of grief” is such that “you are impaled beneath it, hardly in a condition to express your sorrow.
” Her services are needed because “the nature of grief” is such that “you are impaled beneath it, hardly in a condition to express your sorrow.