Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? Two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
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.
