A thrillingly radical deconstruction of family relationships and the social roles we play ... Unnerving, desperately tense ... admirers of Kitamura’s previous novel, Intimacies, will recall the taut discipline of that book’s prose, and trust that, here, the language has been loosened by design ... Auditionis a novel of mirrored halves, angled towards an absent centre ... Acutely aware of the very real trauma that attends the loosening of personhood, Audition nonetheless thrills at the freedoms made possible through collapse. The result is a literary performance of true uncanniness: one that, in a very real sense, takes on life.
It’s her most thrilling examination yet of the deceit inherent in human connection ... The dominant mood of Audition, to elegant effect, is an even quieter form of dread.
A blisteringly incisive, coolly devastating tour de force of controlled menace ... Kitamura...writes sentences that glitter with steely power and produces fiction of uncommon psychological nuance ... A radically disquieting and eerily unnerving meditation on the nature of identity and the construction of selfhood. It insistently raises questions about the things we most take for granted ... Kitamura gets behind the masks of common vision and produces fiction of visionary impact. Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.
The first time I read Audition, I found it a deftly crafted, slow-burn psychological thriller full of sly metafictional reflections on the nature of storytelling and identity, on just how much rehearsal, interpretation and collaboration it takes to produce these performances we so blithely call our lives ... Any definitive 'truth' would only diminish the deeper and more mysterious truths of Kitamura’s resolute irresolution. The pleasure and the power inhere in the parallax view.
Plays again and again with the idea that the shared reality of intimate relationships is merely the result of the performances that unfold between people and the flawed interpretations they invite ... The formal moves by which Kitamura delivers the actor to this place are unusual and interesting, yet the trajectory toward giddy estrangement is familiar.
Nobody writes like her, those lissome lines and abundance of commas. She’s one of the few who can pull off tell-don’t-show ... [A] mouse-trap of a novel ... Ambiguities which Kitamura...molds gracefully into a tale of desire in myriad forms ... An alluring addition to an oeuvre whose works are larger on the inside than the outside, rendered in glittering sentences.
The gaps are...deep ... Pure Kitamura ... The central question of the book: Can a novel conjure up emotion without stable characters? What happens when the protagonist’s traits are withheld, undermined, and revised again and again? ... Reading a narrative that seems solid and suddenly isn’t, we’re unsettled and horrified too — or at least that’s the hope ... In Audition, the aridity is the point, but it can be hard to stomach. For all their interest in absences and gaps and frustrated desires, her past two novels still kept the reader well fed ... The book is almost all idea. It seems Kitamura wants to say something else about translation and interpretation...but the hat trick doesn’t quite come off ... Who are these people to one another, really? We may not need to know.
Kitamura’s novels have the propulsive quality of the genres she borrows from—the murder mystery, the courtroom drama—even though they are largely concerned with the distance between characters and the fine mesh of misapprehensions that constitutes most relationships ... Disorienting, told in two halves that seem to contradict each other. Its eeriness and detached tone reflect a profound discontent with the narrowing roles available to a woman past a certain age ... Prizes open the question of what a family is and what pretenses sustain it ... There’s a sense that the greatest revelations take place deep within the private life—in places so buried that they can be accessed only through secrecy, delusion, or pretense ... Kitamura makes them unfamiliar in new, unexpected ways; the smallest private thought or action can thoroughly change what they’re capable of feeling and doing. We don’t—can’t—know them at all.
Formally ambitious ... Uneventful yet ominous ... Acquires a dreamlike quality ... The sentences are sinuous, paratactic, reflecting the instability of the characters’ natures and the relations between them, allowing different possibilities to be held in tension before receding again ... Can be unsatisfying ... Kitamura transmits her characters’ discomfort to her readers, denying us the relief of immersion: we can’t be where we are, but we aren’t taken anywhere else ... Kitamura seems to have reached some kind of end point, to have exhausted the possibilities of portraying characters caught in the awareness of their own false positions ... Whether or not the reader feels a shudder of recognition, it’s unclear where the project can go from there.
Kitamura excels at creating an atmosphere of foreboding, and, reading this first half, one senses that an explosive revelation must be only a few pages away ... Uncanny ... Chilling ... Kitamura’s novels tend to skim the surfaces of interpersonal relationships, offering neat snapshots rather than rich and full portraits. Reading her fiction, I often longed for more insight—not into the nature of relationships generally but into the specific people whose lives were taking shape on the page ... In her spare, cerebral novels, Kitamura reveals how much lies beneath the surfaces of our bodies and our sentences, and how much about one another we cannot know.
Kitamura is constantly assembling and then scattering evidence of what's true and what’s a performance ... Kitamura’s readers will recognize the characteristic cool, quiet intensity of her prose, and her interest in the power dynamics of intimate relationships. What sets Audition apart is its improvisational nature ... A startling and unnerving examination of the parts we play ... Readers are offered few definitive answers about what happens between these main characters, and who they really are to one another ... The story’s uneasy resolution, align with the novel’s architecture, but in the end offer no emotional core for readers to hold onto as it all fades to black.
Makes an almost hackneyed trope...seem utterly original, and it does this through its unusual structure ... A lightning bolt of a novel ... Demands an attentive and careful reading.
Kitamura’s syntax evokes...disquiet. She deploys comma splices and eschews quotation marks. Punctuation, under her nimble hand, elongates but does not define ... The true dynamics at play are enigmatic, and the quality of relationships within this so-called family are mushy at best ... [Her previous books] were more satisfying than Audition, perhaps because theater always brings such tensions to the fore ... But satisfaction is not a requirement for a novel. It is not a requirement to be told the complete truth, nor is it always possible to learn what is true for other people—or even necessarily desirable.
Audition stresses the contingent nature of truth and playacting, but its own story is difficult to differentiate from a formal dramatic exercise. At times Ms. Kitamura seems like someone tinkering with knobs and settings, slightly adjusting the threesome’s behavior to alter the dynamics of their relationship ... One superb scene, however, transcends mannerism ... Suddenly, her many performances collapse on top of one another, creating a confusion that feels, at last, like reality.
A twisted tale ... Kitamura is more interested in being clever than being compelling. Audition carries all the signs of a critic’s darling: there are no quotation marks, there is ethical ambivalence and thematic commentary is prized over storytelling. The reader will be intellectually rewarded if they are up for the adventure. For the rest of us, the journey is interesting but alienating.
Kitamura brilliantly designs her story about the relationships among a woman, her husband, and a young man into a Hitchcockian narrative that is suspenseful, multi-dimensional, and haunting ... Appears simple ... Kitamura’s prose captures the voice and psychology of her narrator perfectly. Through the narrator’s contradictions, slips, and omissions she shows her narcissism anxieties, and desires ... Raises profound questions.
This passionless novel is for trendy fiction courses, not real people ... Promisingly tackles identity and love with an extreme plot twist. But the writing is lifeless.
Deploys that Outline-patented register of philosophical meditation, this time to unsettling and even unfathomable purpose – which is another way of saying I just didn’t get it ... There’s a hair’s breadth between intrigue and time-wasting, and I don’t think Audition knows the difference; we’re as likely to be grumpy as gripped ... The tricksy self-cancelling leads to blankness upon blankness. ... A character in a novel that’s fundamentally uninterested in creating one ... Kitamura questions how fiction works simply by emptying it of significance ... Whatever the key to this joylessly evasive experiment, I ended up feeling that Kitamura could keep it.
Mysterious ... Kitamura is a master of writing people who are both inscrutable and glaringly, psychically alive, which is to say real people, and obfuscation seems the point here, making this a perfect fit for readers of literary-puzzle novels.
Taut and alluring ... Throughout, she succeeds in creating a complex and engrossing portrayal of her characters’ blurry boundaries. Readers won’t be able to put this down.
Slippery and penetrating ... [An] elegant knife of a story ... Kitamura rewards close readers of this through-the-looking-glass disruption. So much glints below the surface in her purring, pared-down sentences ... In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.
