Audition

I didn't know quite what to make of this novel by Katie Kitamura but it certainly made me think. Audition opens with two people meeting for lunch in a New York restaurant: a middle aged actress and a young man. They don't know each other, but the young man at least is convinced that they have a deep bond, something the woman denies. We learn that her long-standing marriage has been undermined by infidelity, and that she is struggling to unlock a pivotal scene in the play she is currently rehearsing, a hinge scene between two halves of the drama.

With an abrupt switch, we find ourselves in part two. Time has passed; the play is coming to the end of a long and triumphant run, the difficult scene successfully mastered. But the relationship between the actress, her husband and the young man of part one is fundamentally different, and that changes everything.

I think Kitamura is interested in the roles we play, not just in theatre but in everyday life, and perhaps suggesting that we can't see ourselves except in relation to others: as wife to a husband, mother to a child, actress in a cast, daughter to a parent. I found this quite a bleak outlook as it implies that there can be no authentic sense of self, and that all our relationships are essentially performances, whether for ourselves or for the benefit of others. This in turn suggests that there are limited possibilities for authentic connection between people, and I'm uneasy with that conclusion. 

Audition is an intriguing literary exercise, but ultimately one I found difficult to relate to -- maybe that was the whole point!