Audition
Katie Kitamura
The narrator of this novel is hyper-aware, attuned to every detail. For example, when she asks her husband a question, she observes that ‘the pause that followed was so infinitesimal that it might have been imagined, or it might have been merely the product of some minor circumstance – ice sticking to the tray, an unyielding stopper, a speck of dust in the eye. It might have been, and yet my senses were roused again’. The result is a narrative that is taut and claustrophobic – from the outset I felt a sense of foreboding.
I also admired the descriptions that this approach generated, particularly of the narrator’s emotional state. As the passage above shows, she is attuned to alternate interpretations, and thus uncertain. When a woman shakes her hand, she notices the lightness of her grip; her analysis of the significance this might have fills a paragraph and incudes the suggestion that ‘she made it so that I was the one who was grasping, the one who was seeking more than was given’. This left me, as a reader, equally uncertain – about the narrator herself. Is she paranoid? Anxious? Or just exceptionally astute?
This uncertainty pervaded my entire reading. The first half of the novel tells the story of a woman who is rehearsing for a performance but struggling because she feels that the script is inconsistent, that the writer ‘had grown bored of the character in the midst of writing […] and wanted to write a different character’ and that the two halves of the play thus contain ‘not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether’. The book itself has two sections and, as the second begins, it performs exactly the same rupture of which the actress has spoken. I was so discombobulated by this that I had, only a few pages further on, to put the book down. I didn’t come back to it until the next day.
The blurb asserts that the novel ‘[rewrites] our understanding of the roles we create every day […] and the truths every performance masks’. I would say that my understanding was not so much rewritten as unwritten. I got to the end and felt that I understood very little. It was a fascinating experience.
Leave a comment