It usually happens that I start several books before finding one I read straight through. For me in September, this book was Audition by Katie Kitamura. A few years ago I read Kitamura's Intimacies, about an interpreter at The Hague embroiled in the power of words, the power of power, the power of love. The read was good, but not until Audition did I find Kitamura at her most intriguing.
Audition follows a stage actress of some renown as she takes on new roles, professionally and personally, that could prove her undoing. From page one, it's written with fuming intensity, a microscopic flaying of interactions between characters that has great heft behind it. We readers begin to feel that a life is at stake—or at least a sanity—in each exchange.
I love that first moment of questioning a narrator, the first time a scene reveals its tricky, holographic plumage. Who's telling the truth, the first-person voice or her supporting characters? Kitamura winds the narrative in on itself, most notably in an early scene where our stage actress suspects trickery while showing herself in the light of a trickster. Unreliable narration is everywhere and I'm not tired of it. For me, this is a mystery novel.
It's also a novel that I found mirrored me, in a strange way. Our main character reveals at one point: "I was the only one who had imagined too much." That feeling of exposure in revelation hits hard.
I remember the time a stranger approached teenaged-me in a London square and asked if I had migraines. Of course, the stranger was a reporter doing a story, but my response was: How did you know I had migraines? For years my family repeated the story affectionately, proof to them of my unworldly innocence, but to me it signaled an ominous overstepping of imagination. You might say it was early evidence of later bipolar paranoia. My own "audition" as a functional person was, as the main character's, becoming "disastrous."
Audition is tidily divided into two parts in just under 200 pages; part two is where things get really weird. I spent most of these second hundred pages trying to decipher the outline of these characters' relationships. Without giving too much away, I can repeat with more emphasis that this novel is a convincing portrayal of psychosis. It was absolutely riveting. We readers see the main character lost in a role, "coming up for air," departing the secure "shore" of her personhood for the sake of both a role on stage and one at home.
At one point, I was convinced the novel was a story of post-partum psychosis such as I'd gone through. The off-balance family unit here is a smoky portrait of what I myself could have experienced. That's doubtless just me—or you, perhaps, if you've been through it—but it shows Kitamura's hand at etching teetering characters who never level with the reader. Now that I'm healthy, it's delicious to read such a story.
I experienced something related while reading a different book this summer, Lonesome Dove. At points in that novel, I was so immersed, I gasped out loud. The pacing then was perfect, as was Larry McMurtry's structuring of a story that we understand as no more than a story: Paradoxically, it's our realization that the story is no more than a story that aids our total immersion in it. Only within the comfortable confines of a story can we passively take in, say, a blackening swarm of locusts or a starving man's naked march across a great plain. Or a woman tumbling past the mooring lines of sanity. Audition shows just how much punch a brief story can pack, when every word is a sword.
Kate Oden is a freelance writer, editor, and translator living in Hanover. She publishes more brief book reviews on Substack.