Recent Reading: Audition by Katie Kitamura

Kitamura’s novel Audition is an impressive story of two very different ways of seeing an event. I thought many of the sentences were very well constructed. However, at least in my opinion, great sentences are a necessary but not sufficient condition for a literary novel to succeed. I am not sure why, but the book just felt cold, distant, that it just did not speak to me.

However, Kitamura’s novel did remind me of two other books I deeply enjoyed reading for both their great language as well as their shifting sense of narrative identity.

The first book I am reminded of would be Philip Roth’s The Counterlife in which you have a story of Nathan Zuckerman and his brother Henry. Or perhaps I should say you have multiple different stories of each of them. I think. Roth’s book is deeply creative and, in my opinion, funny.

The second book I am reminded of would be Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. A 999 line poem written by John shade with an introduction and commentary in the form of endnotes written by Charles Kinbote. Somehow the two tell very different stories. There is, arguably, a third story of Shade’s deceased daughter speaking through the poem from the grave, I think.

Finally, I realize that I finally need to see the Akira Kurosawa picture Roshomon.

Have you read Audition?

What stories come to your mind when you think about identity and creative approaches to storytelling?