by It is scary that great actors are scary. Studied movements accept life; A living other appears. Bad spectacle does not achieve such uncanny. Excessively self -confident, the failing actor never dissolves into her role. We see how they watch themselves.
Although we rarely see her on stage, the actor who tells the audition hears Katie Kitamura’s more annoying, desperately tense fifth novel, never appearing. Even before passing, outstanding phrases seem to be revealed under the stress of a non -sustainable self -confidence. “You could think that people wondered how we did it,” she says, describing the comfortable lifestyle in Manhattan, whom she shares with her husband. The perspectives are winding, unmanageable. Who is this “you” who could imagine your way into the opinions of others? In the course of the novel, these releases have experienced and then leased and resisted as social roles. “How many times were told how much it meant for one or the other person to see them Someone who looked like me On stage or on the screen, ”she says, one of many moments in the novel in which ethnicity is both available and at the same time absent: recognized, but never explicitly mentioned.
The opening pages of the novel form a nervous, disabled physicality. The narrator hits a man in a restaurant. It is anxious, hypergilant. She narrowed her gaze into the body of the body and even invested the inquiries from a waiter with an important meaning: “He tended his head and kept the door open, and because of this low politeness – an invitation or an injunction – I went inside.”
At the table, a young man, Xavier, awaits, confidently and weakly discussed. The meeting is nervous and cumbersome and is rendered in a wall carpet of small gestures. First of all, we ask ourselves whether we are exposed to the prose equivalent to poor spectacle: a clear movement that means nothing-a impression that is reinforced by the stumbling block of the narrator’s stumbling materials.
But the admirers of Kitamura’s former novel intimacies will remember the tight discipline of the prose of this book and trust that the language was loosened by design here. Sure enough if the change of movement and syntax – appropriately interrupted by the smallest gestures – is caused by a deeper existential fear. Xavier leans back, breathes. The narrator with a feeling of shock recognizes the movement as her own “from my films, my stage appearances and copied without shame. A piece of me, to the body of a stranger.” Xavier studied her, believes her and then played her back.
Later Xavier repeats the movement and another layer of meaning is added. It is, as we find out, a gesture that the narrator rejected, a TIC that she went back to, “when I didn’t know how I worked out of a scene when I was not sure what happened to a character at a certain moment”.
We see ourselves for what we are: actors on a mere stage, play scenes with no meaning, for an audience that was never there
Xavier’s acquired mannerism releases the plastic of the narrator’s performance and captures it in her own self -confidence. It reveals the plastic of their narrative one after the other – the very act the story. The tissue of internal coherence was rented. The reality, fragile Bothin concepts of the narrator’s psyche and the self-reflecting structure of the novel cannot apply.
The audition is a novel of mirrored halves that are angled towards a absent center. In the first, Xavier tells the narrator that he believes that he is her abandoned son – something she makes clear is impossible. In the second, he Is Your son or at least he willingly plays this role. In the first half, the narrator remembers sadness after a miscarriage. In the second it is her husband who got lost. It is not so much a question that is real; This is a novel about the suspension of unbelief that is necessary for life in order to be tolerable at all.
The key to these coexisting realities is a mysterious central scene in the game that the actor can perform – the “Black Box”, which changes the entire understanding of the audience for the character. In the first half of the novel they rehearse it and fight. In the second she mastered it – the piece is an unrestricted success. This scene is never described. Instead, the narrator describes what she finds in it: an area of ”infinite contingency”, “very private”, in which she is briefly able to find a “single, uniform self”.
Critically, this puzzling scene may not contain its own meaning. Similar to the gesture that is suitable by Xavier, Xavier is that it is hardly more than a creative device, a strategy that is used in view of the uncertainty. The narrator discussed during a rehearsal and realizes that the playwright “has no idea what she had written, no idea how it would work in the piece … The scene she had written was nothing more than a placeholder”. That the narrator finds such freedom, such a self -coherence, such freedom sense In this scene, no such sense or the meaning for the profound thesis of this novel is only after she has discovered it. It goes into the unwritten absence of the meaning that we are free to project our own meaning.
At the end of the audition we are in the darkest black box of all: the disaster that arises when the illusory nature of the self is exposed. Just as the illustrator of a character from the coherence of the gestures of an actor arises, the false coherence of the self is the Mirage, which we confuse for a world. If this is exposed as empty, the world collapses and we see ourselves for what we are: actors on a mere stage that show the scenes with no meaning, for an audience that has never been there.
Most novels shrink from the dizzying depths of this absence; To accept, means to dissolve the basic regulations of the form of novels: stability of the character, meaning of the meaning, linearity of the event. The audition becomes the very real trauma, which takes part in the loosening of the personality, which are still enthusiastic about the freedoms made by collapse. The result is a literary performance of true uncanny: one that takes on life in a very real sense.
• The audition of Katie Kitamura is published from far (£ 18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy from GuardianBookshop.com. Delivery fees can apply.
