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Audition

Katie Kitamura

Start date: April 21, 2025

Finish date: May 25, 2025

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What Members Thought

May 26, 2025 Anita Pomerantz rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audio, re-read

To be honest, I think I need to re-read section 1 of this book before I make a total assessment. I also should warn you; I think a lot of people will not like this one. It's very unclear what exactly happens. It's like a literary puzzle. Personally, I love books like this. Ones where I feel engaged while reading it, but then I have to figure out what the author intended. But I also see how it can be completely frustrating. Would absolutely love to read this for a face to face book club. I defini ...more

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Apr 18, 2025 Jill rated it really liked it

Audition is a thinking reader’s book and at the core of it are questions: what happens when the self’s illusory nature is exposed, and one is no longer left with a reliable script or props? What if a family is if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?

Our narrator is a middle-age stage actress who has achieved fame and renown. As the book opens, she is in a restaurant with a young actor, Xavier, who looks erringly like her, right down to some of his tics and gestures. He, too, is an actor Audition is a thinking reader’s book and at the core of it are questions: what happens when the self’s illusory nature is exposed, and one is no longer left with a reliable script or props? What if a family is if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?

Our narrator is a middle-age stage actress who has achieved fame and renown. As the book opens, she is in a restaurant with a young actor, Xavier, who looks erringly like her, right down to some of his tics and gestures. He, too, is an actor and believes he is her son, which is physically impossible. The actress is in the throes of a professional crisis: it is up to her to bridge the two halves of the play with a particularly challenging monologue that, she believes, is a failing of the playwright. To make matters more daunting, her husband, Tomas, is suspicious of Xavier because of his wife’s earlier affairs.

Then we are plunged into Part II and everything is topsy turvy. The play has been successful. Xavier, it turns out, is their son, and he is now living with them, causing discord among the three “actors”, or family members. As a metaphor for the art of acting, the narrator ponders how it is possible to be two things at once – a natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind. Maybe, she reflects, in the space between them, a performance becomes possible.

As an admirer of Kitamura’s work, I have thrilled to her former books, A Separation, and Intimacies, both of which were also narrated by an unnamed woman. This one did not pull me in quite as much as the others. Perhaps it’s because the character, due the analytical structure and themes of the novel, becomes unknowable. The narrator reflects, “…the actual story, the reality of what was happening between us in that moment, was much less easily imagined.”

Audition is a clever book, constructed with acrobatic prose, that focuses on the performances we relentlessly give on the stage of life. I very much admired what Kitamura was accomplishing. I just wish I loved it a little more.

...more

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May 26, 2025 Andrea rated it really liked it

This is a polarizing book-- some people LOVE it and some hate it. I kind of fell in the middle. Like, this is good, but I wasn't blown away. I did learn I had one interpretation of the two halves and other people have a different interpretation that I hadn't considered. That makes it more interesting to me but it's not a game changer.

I don't know! Read it or don't! ...more

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Mar 30, 2025 Jessica rated it it was amazing

Shelves: usa, 2025, i-own-these-books, usa-nyc, usa-new-york

Oh the roles we play. Another outstanding work by Kitamura. Review to come...

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Apr 28, 2025 Dree rated it liked it

Shelves: 2025-reads, asian-am-can-diaspora-lit

I read this with the LARB book club--this is the third Kitamura I have read, and honestly would not have read this if not for the book club.

I did like this book more than the other two--the main character is not so whiney. I still don't like her style--I find her writing stiff and somehow formal--but she is very consistent with this style across books, it is just not for me.

This was actually a great book for discussion. In particular what does the title mean? Who is auditioning, and for what? Th ...more

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Mar 15, 2025 Danielle McClellan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: booker-list-2025, reviewed-for-publication

Katie Kitamura's novels share an unadorned narrative style. Beautiful and spare, the writing can be deceptively straightforward, and there often comes a moment within her novels, an almost imperceptible twist, when readers suddenly realize that they have been subtly directed into mysterious, even murky, territory. It is hard to identify the stylistic technique, to figure out how a first-person perspective, conversationally relating a series of neutral-seeming events, can transmute into something Katie Kitamura's novels share an unadorned narrative style. Beautiful and spare, the writing can be deceptively straightforward, and there often comes a moment within her novels, an almost imperceptible twist, when readers suddenly realize that they have been subtly directed into mysterious, even murky, territory. It is hard to identify the stylistic technique, to figure out how a first-person perspective, conversationally relating a series of neutral-seeming events, can transmute into something so deeply enigmatic. In her newest novel, Audition, Kitamura commits yet another narrative sleight of hand, creating a scaffolding that results in a story more experimental and daring than in her previous books, and perhaps—certainly for those who can accept the challenges of a fluctuating narrative—even more satisfying to read.

Audition opens with an accomplished actress having lunch in a large New York restaurant with Xavier, a handsome young man. She feels uncomfortable with the glances that dart their way, and wonders if people might misconstrue their relationship. But what is their relationship? We learn that Xavier, a stranger to her, had approached her two weeks earlier at the theatre in which she is working on a new play and told her he believed that she might be his birth mother. At the time, she had informed him that this was impossible. Now, however, she reveals to the reader that the two do look quite similar and even share mannerisms. In the restaurant, she looks up and sees her husband unexpectedly appear. He does not seem to see her. She watches as he walks through and then turns and leaves the restaurant. Such oddly disconnected details begin to proliferate, making the scene, while clearly narrated, slightly disorienting to the reader. Who exactly is Xavier? Why does he believe that he is her son? Why is the actress meeting again with him if he is not? Why is her husband at the restaurant? Why does she panic when she sees him? What is not being said?

Kitamura has long explored ideas about language, performance, and identity. Her previous two novels, Intimacies and A Separation, also featured unnamed women protagonists, one a literary translator and the other an interpreter at the Hague. In both novels, the women find themselves in countries foreign to them and grapple with feelings of alienation and dislocation. These earlier novels also appear simple and straightforward in their writing style, but as the main character in Intimacies notes, "The appearance of simplicity is not the same thing as simplicity itself." Audition wrestles with a similar constellation of concerns.

The full review of this novel will be published in the April, 11, 2025 edition of BookBrowse https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/review... ...more

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May 12, 2025 Phyllis added it

Shelves: 2025reading, published-2020s, era-21stcentury, topic-relationships, topic-family-multigenerational, topic-worklife, narrator-single, pagecount-shortunder200pages, topic-parenthood, category-fiction

I really enjoy Kitamura’s writing voice. This novel did not work for me though.

I generally get the meta thing of “all the world’s a stage” and all of us play many roles at various times in our lives, etc., etc. I was all up to appreciate how the novel, with its stark break between part one and part two, was a mirror image of the play in which the actor was performing, with its stark shift in the psyche of the lead character between act one and act two.

But then it all went off the rails for me. P ...more

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May 15, 2025 Aaron Broadwell rated it really liked it

I am very impressed by Kitamura's skill at beautiful prose and the careful, jewel-like composition of this book.

The main character is an unnamed actress and we see two scenes presenting alternate realities of her relationship with her husband Tomas and her (possible) son Xavier. Is one of these versions the 'true' narrative, while the other is a scene that she is acting in? Is one of the scenes a fiction created in the actress's head? Or perhaps one of the scenes is the work of fiction that Xavi ...more

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