ok so it’s not that i didn’t like Audition by Katie Kitamura. in fact, i read most of it in one sitting and i certainly wouldn’t have done that unless i felt somewhat invested. i found the prose gorgeous and the long meandering sentences a joy to read. i think, instead, it’s that i’m not sure i really got it? that even if maybe i did get it, then it just wasn’t really my thing? i don’t know.

because i like surreal weird novels where you’re not quite sure what’s going on! i also like novels that play with structure and style. i didn’t even mind that Audition lacked quotation marks for dialogue, which i know is a hard limit for some readers.

i also didn’t hate that it felt like the narrative itself was mirroring the play our unnamed actor narrator was starring in, in that the main character was hugely different between acts. though, it did feel a bit like the transitional scene the narrator struggles so much to get right in the first part of the book, where she’s unsure the playwright even knew what she’d written, was missing from our narrative entirely. which makes sense, but also made for a jarring transition where i didn’t know what the fuck was going on as we got into the second part.

and for what it’s worth i was on board for the first part of the book. i was curious about our narrator’s relationship with her husband, tomas. i was curious about why she’d keep xavier a secret from him at all. was it a sore spot because he’d wanted a child so badly? or was she just used to their lives feeling separate? and why would she keep the secret even if she knew it might look like infidelity, especially knowing she’d cheated on tomas before? while the second part of the novel definitely revealed tomas’ faults in the relationship, i found it so interesting that our narrator was never previously curious about tomas’ life outside of her.

… it had been a long time since I had wondered where Tomas was, or how he was spending his time. Even when he was traveling for work—or indeed when I was, it was not as if we were together at all times, there could be weeks or even months when we did not see each other, and yet during all those times, I never wondered what he was doing.

but then part one ends in what feels like a cliffhanger and when we pick things back up just a page or two later the cliffhanger is never addressed. instead we’ve moved forward in time and all the facts of their situation are seemingly different. in this new reality, xavier is their biological son and always has been.  or is he? are they all just agreeing to perform roles? it’s confusing and unclear, and things just get muddier from there on out. by the time hana even entered the narrative, i was already a bit checked out.

i feel like Audition has some really interesting things to say about life and performance and the roles we choose to play. and how maybe even when we choose to play different roles there are some truths deep down that don’t change (at least when it comes to the trouble brewing between the narrator and tomas). in fact, there’s a bit of a fourth wall break in the final pages of the book that addresses it head on.

Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind. In the space between them, a performance becomes possible.

it just didn’t hit right for me. it felt at once too on the nose and not quite clear enough. and after getting through the weirdness of the last bit of the xavier, hana, and tomas being a creep mess, i just wasn’t sure i cared anymore. that said, even though this book wasn’t necessarily my favorite, i am now curious about Kitamura’s other work because i did generally enjoy her style choices here, even if i wasn’t fully on board with the narrative.