📚 Audition, by Katie Kitamura

Can you like a book if you don’t understand it?

Around a decade ago I found myself reading The Sound And The Fury in Sierra Leone. I’d probably heard of it and thought it was kind of book, or the kind of author, I should have read. I was stuck in Freetown for weeks, there were no bookshops and this was pre-streaming and pre-me-having-a-Kindle. I didn’t have much to do except be chased by prostitutes on my morning run, so I read a bit. So I read the whole damn book, cover to cover. I didn’t understand it. I don’t mean I didn’t ‘get’ it, I mean I had no idea what was going on. Not a clue, despite reading every word on every page of that thing. One of the lowest moments in my life was when I finished the working day at my pointless job, got back to my room in the shitty hotel, lay down on my bed and picked up The Sound And The Fury. Then the air conditioner above the bed began firing shards of ice at me. Fuck you, William Faulkner.

Fortunately, I understood far more of what was going on in Katie Kitamura’s Audition. The protagonist is an actress. She’s rehearsing the lead role of a play and she finds herself disappointed that the playwright appears not to understand how the two halves of her own story link together, how the lead role transitions from one state of being to another. It is as there was a scene missing that should explain everything.

That missing scene in the play is reflected in the structure of the book. In the first half, the actress is struggling with her character. She flatly and convincingly denies having ever had a child to a man claiming to be her son. She has in the past cheated on her reliable husband.

In the second half, she has nailed the part. The son is very much a part of her life, as her son. Her husband seems the be the less reliable half of the couple.

There is nothing to explain this switch. It’s not just a switch in how the characters feel about each other, it’s a switch in their actual familial relationships - their reality. The central and most obvious question that remains is whether or not Xavier is her son. I struggled to make sense of it, wondering if she had initially lied, if she was mentally ill or if it could be explained by a reverse chronology.

I had to look to book reviews to understand it. I feel it would be dishonest if I reworded the explanation as my own, so this is from The Guardian:

Audition is a novel of mirrored halves, angled towards an absent centre…It’s not so much a question of which is real; this is a novel about the suspension of disbelief necessary for life to be tolerable at all.

And this:

This scene is never described. Instead, the narrator details what she finds within it: a realm of “infinite contingency”, “wholly private”, in which, briefly, she is able to locate a “single, unified self”.

And this:

When the self is unmasked as empty, the world it has projected collapses, and we see ourselves for what we are: actors on a bare stage, performing scenes without meaning, for an audience who were never there.

And finally, this:

Most novels shrink from the vertiginous depths of this absence; to accept it is to allow to disintegrate the basic precepts of the novelistic form: stability of character, dependability of meaning, linearity of event. Acutely aware of the very real trauma that attends the loosening of personhood, Audition nonetheless thrills at the freedoms made possible through collapse. The result is a literary performance of true uncanniness: one that, in a very real sense, takes on life.

So yeah, pretty clever and the book turned from something I don’t understand to something that made sense and I kind of liked. But did I like it if I had to have that explained to me? And am I stupid?

The TLDR from my friend Ashley, who is way better at book reviews than me:

It’s very divisive … I think I enjoyed it? I definitely admired it.

Also: clear and straightforward language and a short book, so an easy read for something I found so difficult. The protagonist’s voice irritated me at first, as she had a WASP-ish affectation that reminds me of a particularly passive-aggressive, bullying American professor I once worked with. But I got over that.