Kitamura’s “Audition” refuses to fall into place
Published at 04:00
“Audition” by Katie Kitamura
A young man seeks out a famous actress and claims he is her son. She knows it’s impossible, but she meets him anyway, time and time again, without really understanding why. This is how the plot looks like Katie Kitamura’s “Audition” which was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 2025, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2026, nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and named by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of the year.
The young man starts working at the theater, moves ever closer into the actress’s life, and finally moves in with her and her husband, where everything slowly dissolves into a fog. The book unfolds a whole fan of riddles. The title is the first, because who is actually auditioning? The young man who has to convince the actress that he is her son or the actress who gets to test the role of mother?
The diptych structure, where everything is thrown around in part two, makes me think of that Freud called “psychic reality”: two incompatible stories can both be true insofar as they organize a desire. But what makes the novel truly enigmatic in the deepest sense of the word is how it refuses the therapeutic gesture we often expect from contemporary prose: the moment when everything “falls into place.” The reader is left in the same position as the analysand before his analyst after a therapy session, one can never be sure what has actually been said or how to interpret it all.
Maybe this is it the real question of the novel: what does it mean to be seen by someone whose gaze you cannot make your own? Being a woman, a mother, an actor, a writer, seems in Kitamura’s world to function as different names for a female masquerade that never ends. But with all that said, I still can’t get enough of the novel. Are the unsolved riddles at the end a sign of intellectual courage or the most convenient way out of a story that would have otherwise required a stand?
The opacity and the cold, detached prose have become something of a hallmark for an entire literary generation. The theater metaphor is also ancient, theatrum mundithe idea that the self does not hide behind the mask but is constituted by it, goes back long before psychoanalysis, to the baroque vanitas motif, Shakespeare’s own scenes within the scene and Epictetus who spoke of life as a role assigned to you by fate – you must play it well whether it is short or long. The question is not whether Kitamura discovers something new, but whether her refinement of this age-old theme shifts something in the way we think about it.
I don’t know. I find myself in the same existential vertigo as the book’s characters. In the end, I tell myself that Kitamura, like Macbeth in his last monologue, wants to remind us that being itself is nothing more than “A poor actor, who makes noise / And makes himself, for an hour’s time, on the stage / And then is not heard from.” If that is the case, even my own hesitation about the book will be just another take in the same audition. I simply believe that Kitamura has succeeded in tapping into a contemporary reflex: our tendency to confuse the incomprehensible with the significant. The less books explain, the more literary they appear, as if we could no longer distinguish between a riddle that hides an answer and a riddle that hides the absence of one.
Sinziana Ravini is a writer, psychoanalyst and cultural journalist.
NOVEL
» Audition
Katie Kitamura
Trans. Ulrika Kärnborg
Sekwa publishing house
