Told in two acts, Katie Kitamura’s AUDITION is a strange, short novel, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I read it. In the first half, a woman and a young man meet for lunch, and their relationship unfolds carefully, revealing the multiple roles each of them play. In the second half, a different reality takes place, shifting perspectives on the characters. I read the second half much faster than the first, and it feels much more unsettling than the first half, which is interesting given that it’s perhaps the more “stable” of the two setups. It’s very clever, almost like a play in itself, looking at performativity and role-playing in a way that feels original.

This was a very strange book which, if it wasn’t for its short length, I don’t think I would have finished.

I’ve come away with the feeling that I’m somehow not intelligent enough to have understood what the author was trying to do. For me, simply, the book felt incoherent. Perhaps I prefer too conventional a plot or more traditional story telling.

I could deal with the shift in relationships between parts one and two, it was interesting and I was keen to see where it went - though I was getting into the story of part one and think I would have liked to spend more time there than the bizarre elements of part 2.

Part 2 was just plain weird and, while I got sense of what had maybe happened, I’m not someone who enjoys a lack of clarity in my books and the changing, ever more confusing relationships left me feeling bewildered.

Sadly it won’t be one I’ll be recommending.

This is a dizzying, disturbing piece of writing that is theoretically informed but which also is self-referential enough to be able to stand alone. It deliberately destructs a linear storyline with two parts - or acts? - that pull in different directions in terms of narrative logic but which cohere in abstract and thematic ways.

Kitamura's previous books have featured an interpreter and a simultaneous translator: here we have an actress so that the text draws together issues of performativity with language - and it's this interrogation of language itself as a medium for performance and, hence, identity that places this book in what might even be figured as a loose trilogy with the previous [book:Intimacies|55918474] and [book:A Separation|30407998].

In this book, the narrator is an actress struggling to find a way to bridge two prime scenes in a play and failing to make the characterisation switch. In a meta twist, this book we're reading is also about a break that divides unified representation into two disjunctions.

In an important conversation, the narrator thinks about how a crucial piece of identity formation - in this case motherhood - is not merely an absence of children, but an act in and of itself: a presence, if you will. And, later, as the narrative dislocates, there is an absence of a critical conversation that is about to take place but which turns out to also be an act or event on which the second half of the story hinges.

I can imagine this book being frustrating to readers who want a logical exposition and nineteenth century realism: instead this plays in that postmodern space of subjectivity and relativity, where all self is a series of performances and there is no such thing as 'authenticity'. Using the framework of theatre works especially well to thematise social collusion and complicity as performance on a grand, mutual scale, and I was also reminded of western theatre's dramatic origins in the festival of Dionysus: the god of theatre as well as ecstasy and divine madness. There is definitely something frenzied about the second part with, perhaps, some kind of catharsis by the end.

In any case, this is a riveting, hallucinogenic read that starts in one place and goes somewhere unexpected and extraordinary. One to read and put back onto the pile to read again.

Loved this book - Katie Kitamura is a generational talent. This was my favorite of hers so far. Well done!! Thank you NetGalley for the ARC

This is a short novel, coming in at just over 200 pages but this really packs an emotional punch.

Very enjoyable and a book you can read in just an afternoon

What a weird little book. I really enjoyed the beautiful writing and the narrative was so compelling, if not confusing. As I read further into the book, it felt claustrophobic and unsettling as it becomes less and less clear what is real and what is not. A masterclass in unreliable narration, I really enjoyed this book.

Thank you NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC!

This book is totally unique and intriguing, although a bit confusing and hard to follow at times it is beautifully written and paced. Overall, I liked the story and I enjoyed reading something quite deep and difficult to figure out. You do really have to think about the conversation between the two characters and appreciate what the author is doing with this book.

A wonderful read so well written really intriguing. enjoyed from first to last page.Trying to figure out what was really unfolding.#netgalley #audition

I must admit I was confused by the story line but it was beautifully written.

I feel that I have to re read it just so I can understand more what the author was trying to do with the plot...

I’ll be honest, I have no idea what happened in the last 50 pages or so. This book is split into 2 parts with varying levels of truth telling and unreliable narration. The main character, an unnamed woman, is an actress who sits down for lunch with a much younger man, Xavier. He is her son, but also not her son, and the centre of her life, but also not. The plot moves incredibly slow as we are slowly drip fed information about these two.

The writing was brilliant, something I cannot fault. Each sentence was beautifully constructed and had a whimsical feel. My criticism comes with the plot itself. I love an unreliable narrator and shifting timeline, but this felt all over the place and impossible to understand towards the end. There were too many moving parts, plot wise, I wish I had an answer by the end but alas I did not.

Audition by Katie Kitamura is a book for those who appreciate form over substance. 2.5 stars.

An unnamed actress walks into a busy NYC restaurant to meet a young man named Xavier. The conversation she’s sharing with him is cut short by her husband Tomas randomly walking in and out of the restaurant - does he think she’s cheating? What is going on? What is he doing here?

That scene jumpstarts the book that follows. The unnamed actress goes about her life and the story slowly unravels how she sees and interacts with the people around her after Xavier walked into her life like a wrecking ball. The book is told in two parts that can be sort of summarized as ‘Xavier walks into MC’s mundane uninteresting life’ and ‘Xavier is part of MC’s life,’ I guess? The last 50 pages of the second part were too much. At no point did I understand what I was reading, but the ending just really had me… frustrated? A lot was happening and I didn’t get why or what was the point.

There was an important conversation left out between Part 1 and Part 2 that I wish had been in the book. And, I do have to ask: (SPOILER-Y: What did I miss? Was Xavier her son? I thought she didn't have any kids. Was he some sort of con artist?)

The writing was beautiful, but the story made me angry and frustrated. It had nonsensical and confusing stuff that bothered me. So, yep: no effing idea what the point of this was. It’s plotless with nice writing. The only thing that kept me interested was my own theory-making about why the book is titled ‘audition.’

Not what I was expecting but all the better for it. It was tense with a constant undertone of about something to happen it really kept me hooked. I liked the two character back and forth dynamic. It is well structured novel written with style. Really good concept and plot. Well worth reading

Katie Kitamura is a underrated author. I adored her Intimacies for the sparse but precise prose and the way it captured half-tones of reserved human emotions. I was excited to be approved for the Audition ARC.

The premise is simple - two people, an older woman and a younger man, are having a meal in a restaurant. We do not yet know who they are and, more importantly, who they are to each other. The narration is unreliable, and new information is slow dripping, changing the reader's understanding of the situation. At first I assumed that the entire novel will be a masterclass in structure and dialogue writing, never leaving the restaurant and keeping changing our perspective of what is happening, and I was very excited at that prospect. Kitamura took the premise in quite a different direction.

Part I is very tense and full of a sense of threat. The reader is drawn into the uneasy relationship between the unnamed protagonist and the enigmatic Xavier. Kitamura's prose absolutely shines here, offering cutting metaphors and imagery to describe nuances of human emotions. Similarly to Intimacies, which focused on simultaneous interpretation at the UN, one of the major themes of the novel is craft - in this case, acting craft. Kitamura writes the intricacies of work with such precision. To be absolutely honest, even at this point I started finding the prose a bit suffocating and got desensitised to it. It read the way artisanal chocolate tastes after you've had a whole box in one go - when you've had too much of it, the craft of the chocolatier fades, leaving the basics of cocoa and sugar. However, I was still mesmerised by the narrative.

As Part I stops right before its climax, we are transported into a different reality and different novel. Without giving too much away, prepare to question what is and is not real. The unreliability of the narration (and the narrator) is crunched to the maximum. To me personally, that took all the wind out of the sails of the novel's greatest strength - the prose. What is the point of describing the nuances of interpersonal relationships if the relationships are not real? Intellectually, I think I understand what Kitamura was going for, making the reader ponder fiction, performance and liminality of conjuring unreality, inherent to any storytelling. If that's your sort of thing, the novel might work for you. Emotionally, I was not invested in Part II, and any sense of rising tension, or dread, or curiosity, which the narrative was trying to impose on me just bounced off.

As it is a literary, not a commercial novel, we never get any straight answers, and I personally might have been asking the wrong questions in deciding to try to figure what was actually going on. The novel reminded me, first and foremost, of The Specters of Algeria by Yeo Jung Hwang, although I think the The Spectres ended up doing something a bit more interesting. On a more commercial plain, there is something of Leave the World Behind and All's Well in Audition, although neither Rumaan Alam nor Mona Awad can offer Kitamura's prose or complexity.

Thank you, NetGalley and the publisher, for a review copy.

Very cool concept and I had such a wonderful time reading this and figuring out who was what to each other. I love the entertainment aspect as well. Highly recommend this unique and vibrant novel.