Three of the pleasures Audition offers

Karie Kitamura's slim novel Audition affected me so strongly, so positively I have obtained two of her earlier novels, A Separation and Intimacies, something I never do. (Probably because there are so many books I want to read. I do read the new book of an author I've enjoyed on the theory that the writer tends to grow more skillful with experience, an obviously false assumption).

Audition's narrator is a middle age actress in the last week or so of rehearsing a new play in which she plays the lead. She lives with her husband Tomas who sounds like an academic who writes articles about art.

The novel has two parts, preparing for opening night and after the production's phenomenal success. I am not going to say more because the novel's structure is one of its pleasures.

Another delight is the (unnamed) narrator's thoughts about life, acting, and art. Is she an unreliable narrator, unable to distinguish between life in the world (real life) and life on stage (playing a role). Until I finished the book and thought about it I had not considered that the narrator may not be the most objective, disinterested reporter of events. I had taken everything she said as verifiable, if fictional, truth.

(Indeed, is any novel's first-person narrator ever a reliable source? Can you—should you—ever entirely trust a narrator's account of events? Something to think about when I'm reading. And writing.)

Another pleasure of Audition is Kitamura's writing. The book is a joy at the sentence level. She is not afraid of long sentences: "And although the actor was only in his sixties, as soon as I heard the story of the notes on the counter, the forgotten lines—not even forgotten, because they had not been retained and then lost again, they evaded his mind's grasp altogether—as soon as I heard this, I was able to envision his death, I was able to imagine the parabolic arc of his decline, I understood that eventually his mind would disintegrate to the point that his memory of the world and of himself, would be lost, and with it everything that formed his being."

I hope that picking out one 99-word sentence does not discourage readers from trying Audition; this one is unusually long, chosen to make my point. If I have deterred a literature loving reader. I apologize. And I apologize to Ms. Kitamura whose work I enthusiastically admire.