Die Probe

by Katie Kitamura, Henning Ahrens (Translator)

Zwei Menschen treffen sich zum Mittagessen in einem Restaurant in Manhattan. Sie ist eine gefeierte Schauspielerin, die für eine bevorstehende Premiere probt. Er ist attraktiv und beunruhigend jung. Was die Schauspielerin anfangs für den Annäherungsversuch eines Fans hält, nimmt bald eine erstaunliche Xavier behauptet nämlich, er sei ihr Sohn – dabei hat sie nie Kinder bekommen. Als im selben Moment auch noch ihr Mann Tomas, ein erfolgloser Schriftsteller, im Restaurant auftaucht, wird ihr klar, dass Xavier ihr Leben aus den Angeln heben kann.

Katie Kitamuras psychologisch brillanter Roman stellt die Frage, wer wir füreinander sind. Ein Vexierspiel über den schmalen Grat zwischen Dichtung und Wahrheit.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Audiobook, Book Club, Novels, New York

177 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 8, 2025

About the author

Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Intimacies. One of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, it was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. It was also one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021. In France, it won the Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere, was a finalist for the Grand Prix de l’Heroine, and was nominated for the Prix Fragonard. Her previous novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book.

Her work has been translated into over 20 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature as well as fellowships from the Lannan, Jan Michalski and Santa Maddalena Foundations. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University. Her new novel, Audition, will be published by Riverhead Books in 2025.

Reviews

[Emily May · Rating 2 out of 5]

A frustrating, high-concept piece of writing. It was beautifully-written and I appreciate it was clever, but it was not my cup of tea.

I was unfamiliar with Kitamura’s work going into this, which was likely an error on my part. Had I known the author typically writes abstract, postmodern stories, I wouldn’t have mistook the premise for something I would enjoy.

In Audition, the narrator is an actress, currently in a play of two very different Acts, struggling to figure out how to play a transitional scene that bridges the two. In true meta fashion, the book itself also consists of two very different parts with Part 1 teasing an important scene, one we never get to see and is completely unmentioned in Part 2.

As noted above, the writing is quite beautiful, and the narrator provides us with with some interesting commentary on race in theatre, as well as on being a mother/childless. But this is one of those literary novels that forces you to ask many questions, yet the answers remain elusive after the final page.

I was contemplating giving it three stars for being quite clever, but the last fifty pages just went completely off the rails. Up until that point, I had felt I somewhat understood the novel structurally and thematically, even if I did not necessarily enjoy it, but then the narrative dissolved into what, in parts, read like random chaos.

In the end, I was left thinking that this is one of those books so abstract that I think you could say it means literally anything, "oh, this symbolises this" and "this is a metaphor for that", so very deep, but books like this exhaust and frustrate me. I don't personally think it's clever to make a mess and wait for others to see art in it.

Don't get me wrong, there are certainly readers for this book. In fact, it is every Literature student’s wet dream— abstract, subjective, meta, and rooted in the heart of western literature: theatre.

Hence why I wasn't a Lit student.

I’ll also be glad when this trend of not using speech marks is over. I don’t know which hipster made this the “literary” thing, but it’s trite at this point. Even the other book I am currently reading is the same (Old Soul).

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

everybody needs to read this book immediately. i don't want to talk about anything else.

https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...

i began reading this book on a train, and as the trip progressed two contradictory feelings built in me until i felt almost frenzied. the first impulse, as i tore through the pages, was that seeing as it was the only book i had brought with me for a weekend i should pause and look out the window or listen to music for the rest of the journey, in order to preserve it. 

the second was to find some means to ensure that neither the ride nor the book ever ended. 

from the moment i picked this up, and in truth even before, i had a feeling about it.

even if the second half wasn't quite as strong as the first, as i read it i found myself revisiting sentences and paragraphs and even pages again and again, that if my focus wasn’t absolute and even if it was that i needed to immediately reread it.

bottom line: i’ve read this book once and yet i’ve read it many times. 

(thank you to the publisher for the arc)

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kitamura won’t let me go; the absence that her characters carry around are loaded with substance. AUDITION, like all her novels, asks the reader to accept the unraveling mystery at the narrative sweet spot--where it splits into two opposing circumstances that would be factually impossible, except this is fiction. And it is a device that works, it worked for me. On the other hand, don’t grab too tightly—handle with care, don’t try to control the narrative, just let it be, accede to the inherent contradictions, and don’t expect a bow to tie this up with, it’s not a fairytale.

I was a stage actor for a time in Austin (nothing big, nothing fancy)—so I do understand the unnamed female protagonist’s ongoing and new conundrums when attempting to flesh out her character. Even though she’s unreliable, she does have true feelings. She’s a stage and film actor, currently in a play. There’s a specific threshold or liminal place in the script, where she tells us that she is compelled to show the audience a major epiphany or transformational turn her character has reached. It may be the most important moment of the play for the actress’s part, at least thus far. The reader doesn’t know the play or the significant juncture, yet Kitamura keeps us fastened and tightly wound around it, as if we knew every line. Kitamura, subtly dazzling and lucent, does that so fluidly.

I said fluidly, not to be confused with fluently. I mean, there are time jumps, some that are almost spastic--- they move with a sharp jiggle. Just go with it. I interpret it as someone whose work life merges with personal life on occasion. Which is the true version and which is the alternate? I think it could be the million-dollar question for a plot-driven story. But this author leans more on theme and character, and playing with two different realities gives us the character and the actor. No wonder she is unnamed!

Language is Katie Kitamura’s magic wand. She knows how to lead or follow with it. Wherever a word or space puts or relieves pressure, she is sure to act. I never even mentioned the actor’s husband, Tomas (a writer) and the other male protagonist, Xavier, but there’s not much I want to say—readers will discover how her play plays into her personal life, and how her personal life plays into the play. Just note that you will either be distracted or driven by the narrator’s two lives. Maybe both.

Sentence by sentence, I was mesmerized. Kitamura’s novels are electrically charged with questions about identity. Here—is our character a wife-mother-actor? A wife-actor? In the twenty-first century, literary novels often ask the reader to examine a person’s identity, and how it is relevant to the story. Identity in AUDITION is the recurrent question with a circumspect answer.

The author is restrained in her text, her prose spare but exacting. However, certain questions must be answered in the abstract. “…I thought that it was true that a performance existed in the space between the work and the audience, that it existed, and was made, in that space of interpretation.”

Another stunner from Kitamura. Thank you dearly to Riverhead and NetGalley for sending me a copy for review.

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025
Listen, I like novels that are experimental and meta, but - unpopular opinion! - the new Kitamura just doesn't have enough meat on the bone. Sure, all the world's a stage (As You Like It; later sociologically investigated in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life), but that this novel in two parts that lets its protagonists change roles asks, as the description of the book suggests, who we are to the people we love seems like an empty promise to me. In both parts, our narrator and protagonist is an actress with a curious tendency to treat life as literature, meaning that she ascribes meaning to every word, every object, every movement, every sound as if an artists put it there after carefully thinking about it - which drives her crazy.

In the first part, a young man contacts her because he believes her to be his mother, which isn't the case - in the second part, she IS his mother. In the first part, she cheats on her husband - in the second part, you guessed it, he cheats on her. In the first part, she struggles with a theater scene - in the second part, she mastered it, and so on. Constantly, she is performing her professional and social roles, responding to the outside world as if it consists of props and prompts, and the effect is truly unnerving and claustrophobic. This is juxtaposed by a playwright she meets, one who, as she slowly comes to understand, has no idea what she has written: The play of our life is a contingent mess, there is no coherence or pre-defined meaning.

Who are we if we have no screenplay, but masks? Sure, that's an interesting question per se, but to me, Kitamura's plot, especially the last chamber play section so reminiscent of The God of Carnage, left me cold: Nothing much happens, except vibes and an actress acting all the way through her existence. It didn't captivate me, and I mainly pulled through because Kitamura's language and scene composition are of course first class.

You can listen to our podcast gang discuss the German translation Die Probe here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus) · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is my third, and probably last, novel by Kitamura. Having read two of her previous works—one I liked, the other not—I can see that she prioritizes style over substance. Sometimes this works for me, especially when the style enhances the tensions, moods, and themes of a story. Other times, well, it feels like it feels like pure aesthetic posturing, an exercise in style—elegant, but ultimately empty. Audition, sadly, isn’t quite as clever as it seems to think it is, particularly in its exploration of performance, selfhood, and the blurring of roles and identities

Kitamura’s prose, on a sentence level, is impeccable. Her style has this almost anthropological quality, reminiscent of classical literature—Charlotte Brontë comes to mind, as well as Russian authors like Tolstoy. She gives us a narrator prone to exhaustive overanalysis, capable of extracting grand insights from a gesture, an item of clothing, an expression, or a single word choice. Much of her storytelling leans into ambiguity, unfolding through a series of tense encounters between characters whose motivations remain elusive—despite the narrator’s obsessive scrutiny. In classic Kitamura fashion, the narrator herself remains cryptic, (often) nameless, nondescript.
The novel’s artifice feels more intentional than in Kitamura’s previous works, as much of the narrative revolves around perception and performance. Audition centers on a narrator who is a theater actress. It begins with her meeting a younger man at a restaurant; their exact dynamic is revealed gradually, but we are left with plenty of questions about the nature of this encounter. The novel ultimately subverts expectations about their relationship, and the narrative continues to explore how perceptions can obscure, or even reshape, the truth. At its core, Audition mines the tensions and unknowns between people: the narrator, her husband, and later, her son.
I found the narrative shift—not quite a twist, it isn’t trying to be, but a reframing of things—somewhat uninspired. Had we had more of an insight into the narrator’s upcoming play, maybe then it would have worked better…for all the meticulous dissection of characters’ words and appearances, they never quite feel like fully realized people—just names on the page. Which is a problem when the entire novel is preoccupied with how people perform their various roles in relation to others. Toward the end, there’s what is meant to be a climactic moment, a burst of tension, but it plays out as unintentionally goofy rather than impactful. I was reminded of Dexter Palmer's Version Control, another book with an out-of-pocket scene that asks you to just accept several characters acting in a way that makes zero sense—something that would work in a Lynchian fever dream but here is played straight.

In some ways, the novel’s performative nature fits its themes, but that didn’t make it any more compelling. It failed to elicit any strong or recognizable emotion beyond boredom, or, at most, mild irritation. The narrator offers little beyond sharp observations that, while technically impressive, feel hollow—more of a literary flex than something truly meaningful, especially when applied to characters who barely exist on the page. Audition ultimately feels like literary peacocking—stylistically assured but emotionally vacant. Fans of the author will likely find this far more rewarding than I did. That said, I want to stress that this review is purely based on my personal impressions of the book. I recognize that Kitamura is a skilled writer…maybe I’m just not her ideal reader.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind. In the space between them, a performance becomes possible.

This is a dizzying, disturbing piece of writing that is theoretically informed but which also is self-referential enough to be able to stand alone. It deliberately destructs a linear storyline with two parts - or acts? - that pull in different directions in terms of narrative logic but which cohere in abstract and thematic ways.

Kitamura's previous books have featured an interpreter and a simultaneous translator: here we have an actress so that the text draws together issues of performativity with language - and it's this interrogation of language itself as a medium for performance and, hence, identity that places this book in what might even be figured as a loose trilogy with the previous Intimacies and A Separation.

In this book, the narrator is an actress struggling to find a way to bridge two prime scenes in a play and failing to make the characterisation switch. In a meta twist, this book we're reading is also about a break that divides unified representation into two disjunctions.

In an important conversation, the narrator thinks about how a crucial piece of identity formation - in this case motherhood - is not merely an absence of children, but an act in and of itself: a presence, if you will. And, later, as the narrative dislocates, there is an absence of a critical conversation that is about to take place but which turns out to also be an act or event on which the second half of the story hinges.

I can imagine this book being frustrating to readers who want a logical exposition and nineteenth century realism: instead this plays in that postmodern space of subjectivity and relativity, where all self is a series of performances and there is no such thing as 'authenticity'. Using the framework of theatre works especially well to thematise social collusion and complicity as performance on a grand, mutual scale, and I was also reminded of western theatre's dramatic origins in the festival of Dionysus: the god of theatre as well as ecstasy and divine madness. There is definitely something frenzied about the second part with, perhaps, some kind of catharsis by the end.

In any case, this is a riveting, hallucinogenic read that starts in one place and goes somewhere unexpected and extraordinary. One to read and put back onto the pile to read again.

Many thanks to Random House, Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley

[jay · Rating 2 out of 5]

i got nothing out of that

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

[4.5 stars]
Upon a reread I think I enjoyed this even more. It’s interesting reading part 1 again after having read the whole book. I have a few theories and ideas about what she’s doing and saying with this book but I love even more that it’s so open to viewing it through various lenses. The writing is SO sharp and beautiful, even when it feels almost clinical in its exacting nature.


Original Review:
Two parts. Two stories. How do they connect? Are they connected? What does the gap between the reality they present and the reader's interpretation mean for the story as a whole?

I have not been so enamored by a story like I was for the first half of this book in a long while. I LOVE Kitamura's writing. It's just my brand of slightly pretentious literary fic and I mean that in the best way! It's so interior and cagey and you can't quite trust what you are reading, but it's also very clear and sharp and full of wonderful run-on sentences that you somehow never lose track of. I ate it up.

The 2nd half takes a slight turn that I found completely disorienting and kept me wanting to read it all as fast as I could. I still don't fully know if I know what happened, but I think it's incredibly smart and exciting and one that is worth sitting with and thinking about. It would make a fascinating book club discussion! I can see myself revisiting this and even maybe bumping up my rating to a 5. She has so many interesting things to say about roles and performance and stories we tell each other and ourselves.

This comes out in April 2025 and I hope people pick it up and don't read too much about it before they do! It's best to go in with little knowledge and no expectations. Enjoy!

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize

There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.

Audition by Katie Kitamura is a brilliant novel, both in terms of the prose, which reminded me of Rachel Cusk at her best, and in its clever, and unsettling, construction.

Xavier began to eat. As I watched him, the movement of his mouth as he chewed, his sinuous throat, I felt an unexpected charge between us. Although he was a stranger to me, in so many respects unfathomable, I knew the details of the fantasy he had created, the castle he had built in his mind, he had shared its private architecture with me and that disclosure was a form of intimacy.

The second half of the novel continues from the first, but with a crucial scene missing, and with one key shift that upends a key part of the previous narrative arc.

There was no trace of the young man I had encountered only two weeks earlier, vibrating with uncertainty, he seemed to be a completely different person. As he held the door open for me, I saw that he was absorbed in, or had been absorbed by, the role of the assistant, that he was performing a part he had studied carefully, just as he had presumably studied the part of my long-estranged son. Like an actor moving on in the wake of a disastrous audition, shedding the skin of a role for which he had not been destined, and seeking out the next opportunity.

And then there is a final coda which upends the whole logic of the story and makes us question what we are reading, and if the whole thing is a staged performance.

Inside, too much light, every lamp and fixture switched on, so that the interior appeared strangely flattened, without the depth of a normal room. The objects in the apartment looked suddenly insubstantial, almost like props, of the sort that appeared a perfect likeness but revealed themselves to be falsely constructed when you handled them, too light, or only partially composed. I leaned against the wall to steady myself, and discovered that it too seemed hollow, thin and rickety, as if it might collapse if I leaned with too much weight. The walls of my very own home, the apartment I had lived in for so long.

There are various 'theories' I've seen as to what is going on, but I don't think this is a novel that follows normal narrative logic, and I hope if one asked Kitamura what she thinks happened she might reply as Josipovici did to me when I asked about his brilliant The Cemetery in Barnes, "If I knew that, I wouldn't have written the book."

What was a family, if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

[Jennifer nyc · Rating 3 out of 5]

The summary of my review? Read Intimacies first. That’s a taut gem—smart, efficient, introspective, sad, hopeful, unique. This is also unique, but much more difficult to absorb. I highly recommend reading this with a buddy (which I didn’t do).

Here are some of my issues:

1. As I was starting to sink into these characters and premise, (where a famous actress is approached by a young man who thinks he’s the son she gave up, but the reader is confided in as to why this is impossible), Part 2 comes and shifts the whole reality. It’s just as interesting and well-written a reality as Part 1, but it means I was jolted out of the intimacy we were establishing, and sent back to start all over again.

2. The interior of the main character in this one is harsh compared to Intimacies’ hazy, vulnerable lead. Here I wondered if she was even capable of empathy, and my stomach was in knots at times. There wasn’t the humor needed to mitigate this. Before I got to feeling the empathy-lack, the voice was reminding me of Rachel Cusk. I loved Cusk’s trilogy, but was surprised by the distance I felt Kitamura wanted to keep here.

3. The interior musings in Intimacies were deep, yet efficient. Here, as early as Part 1, I was already feeling we were going over and over some things too compulsively.

So, why these alternate realities for these characters in this particular way? I could come up with all kinds of theories that involve storytelling and writing, wish-fulfillment and facing who you would be, even within the path not taken. But I don’t really know, and it all feels like a creative exercise rather than a naturally occurring emotional synthesis.

——-

I did love the question of whether or not it matters if an actor feels good about their performance. My first job was ASM to an off-Broadway show, and I remember distinctly being less impressed with the performances where the actors felt they had total control. The ones where they would beat themselves up for losing the thread always contained the most riveting, human moments. And there’s lots to think about in this novel about preparedness and control of one’s entire body as a trained performer, and whether that leads to excellence in life and art.

I also loved how the actress faces herself and her assumptions about who she is in relationships intermittently—that felt brave and true. Kitamura is still an artist with her prose. I’m happy I read this, and happy she’s experimenting with the form. I just usually feel this magic moment of synthesis when I read literature where themes come together, and the truth underneath the details emerges fresh and whole.

I still look forward to reading A Separation, and anything else Kitamura writes. My reading experience with Audition still makes me want more.

—————

And I must share her prose, with some examples of her quiet dread:

“I was aware that Xavier was watching me closely, with a hunger that sat too close to the surface.”

“I felt, in his departure, a feeling of regret so pronounced it seemed to exert a gravitational pull, it seemed to pull me to the ground. I could have gotten to my feet and called him back. I could have run after him, tugged at his arm. But there had been something that stopped me.”

“Anger surged through me, a sharpening of all my instincts. The situation was more dangerous than I had previously understood, below the surface demands and obtrusions of his personality was a ruthlessness I had not perceived or prepared for.” [this is how I ended up feeling about the narrator. Deliberate projection?]

“…I had learned to live with greater discipline, to inhabit a certain quietude, so that I no longer fully remembered what it felt like to be so open to the world, to take such pleasure in throwing myself onto the crashing waves of other people’s temperament.”

“When he was younger there had been something grasping in his manner, which was not unusual in someone so ambitious, someone who wished to make his mark upon the world and who cared what people thought of him. But as he attained further success in his work, he became less interested in what other people thought, his ego no longer requiring external reinforcement, and then less interested in other people more generally.”

“Said had a successful gallery career that was predicated on small shifts in his practice, sufficiently minute that his market remained untroubled, but together substantial enough to create the impression of artistic revolution. Lately, however, Said had talked of making larger changes in his work, he was tired of pandering to the market, even if it had made him enormously wealthy.”

“There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.” [this seems key thematically, but I still can’t make sense of the whole].

“…the success of the film happened to coincide with a change in the culture, in the writing, a change in the way of seeing. For the first time, I was allowed to be human. I could even be at the center of a story. And later still, there were parts that consumed me, so that I could say the life that was performed, on a set or in a theater, could at times feel more real to me than my actual life.”

I think she’s hinting at something with that last quote, too, how strange a profession acting and writing must be to so fully inhabit characters in a fictional world.

3.5

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, intelligent, slippery and definitely something I would like to reread!
Motherhood and infidelity, a marriage under pressure and racial tension, come together in an erudite mix. An abstract work that seems to ask "Is the self an act we perform?"
As if the world of fiction had lost its protective powers, the line between reality and invention undone.

Audition is a work in two distinct pieces. Following an unnamed elder actress, we start off with a restaurant scene. I kind of love novels that depict restaurant scenes, so normal but also often fraught and full of tension. Katie Kitamura opens up the book with an older woman meeting a younger, beautiful man (He had a face that was made to being looked at). And then her husband shows up.
The ambiguity of relations is perfectly captured, including the inversion of the scene in Paris, long ago. This first chapter seems to contemplate the opportunity of one event upending a whole life.

Interesting how the second part of the book is so different, with parents dealing with kids moving back in, and doing an u-turn on the nature of Xavier (What was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?).
There is scene in chapter 10 reminds me of Nicole Kidman reaction to her privileged kids in The Perfect Couple while Chapter 11 gives me Taylor Swift “I’m the problem, it’s me” vibes. We have the question, also explicitly raised in the novel, what it means for A woman who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real.

The novel reminds me of the writing of Rachel Cusk and Catherine Lacey in The Möbius Book. Also the non-linearity of Bae Suah her work comes to mind.

Am I smart enough to fully understand this novel? was a question that emerged while being engrossed in it. And I am still not sure of the answer to that question.
The structure of the novel is a mirror of the emptiness at the heart of the play, centred around one character almost being two characters in the novel. Essentially we, as the main character, are confronted with a missing black box.
This emptiness of discovering the one who wrote the play also doesn’t know how the scene should be, feels pervasive yet a the same time elusive: the scene she had written was nothing more than a placeholder

The self-cancelling of part 1 of the novel is fascinating and raises the question (this is really a novel that does that excellently, raising questions) if one of both parts of the novel the play written by Xavier? Is this novel a commentary on parallel lives, like a literary version of Celine Song’s Past Lives?

Such an abstract work in a sense and hard, at least for me, to fully warm up to, while offering a tantalising puzzle and raising important, if diffuse questions.

[Grace Nathans · Rating 1 out of 5]

sooooo pretentious and nonsensical. whatever happened to telling a story? are we too cool to have a plot?

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katie Kitamura deliberately designed her novel to resist a fixed interpretation. She presents two overlapping but ultimately clashing narratives, leaving it up to her readers to decide how each relates to the other. Throughout she privileges the perspective of an unnamed narrator, a 49-year-old, Asian-American actor whose career’s finally taking off, after years of being relegated to bit parts and stereotypical characters. She attributes an element of this belated success to shifts in the surrounding culture – what once rendered her marginal now seems to add to her potential value. On the surface the narrator’s existence is enviable, she’s the star of a major theatrical production and in her downtime lives with her equally successful husband in an elegant West Village apartment. And yet there’s a distinct impression that all of this is precarious that the narrator’s life is being shaped by external forces, as with her theatrical performances, her lines are not entirely her own. And agency, or rather lack of agency, is a central theme here. Gender, and associated roles such wife and/or mother, is a key constraint. This is brought to the fore by the narrator’s encounters with a younger man Xavier who’s in his twenties – his name may or may not be an allusion to the influence of Javier Marias on Kitamura’s work.

Kitamura’s story undergoes a momentous shift as the first half gives way to the second – although there are various clues to what later takes place scattered throughout earlier episodes. The narrator’s mannered, oddly formal tone becomes increasingly frantic almost disjointed. Kitamura wanted aspects of her novel to resemble a David Lynch film – for me Mulholland Drive was the one that came to mind - although Kitamura’s surreal flourishes are far more muted, far less flamboyant than Lynch’s. Kitamura also consciously draws on a certain style of horror associated with Rosemary’s Baby and writers like Shirley Jackson. Kitamura’s intent on replicating a form of atmospheric unease, an intensifying queasiness. Some of the scenes that take place in the narrator’s apartment conjure a claustrophobia, a simmering uncertainty akin to that experienced by Rosemary before she uncovers the nature of her neighbours’ conspiracy. Like Rosemary in those early stages, the narrator’s assumptions about her reality are challenged by near-uncanny events, undermining once taken-for-granted knowledge: both of self and of others, particularly her husband Tomas. Some of this is achieved through the introduction of Hana a disturbing figure who also sparked, rightly or not, questions about the function of mirroring in Kitamura’s piece.

Kitamura’s clearly drawing on her background in literary and cultural studies here: the emphasis on cultural scripts; rituals of everyday life; on performance and the presentation of the self; the questioning of notions of authenticity. She also appears to be constructing a commentary on the nature of fiction writing - the novel’s scope, the potential of realism colliding with artifice. Kitamura’s decision to focus on theatrical performance was an effective means of highlighting a number of her preoccupations. Unlike film or TV, theatre is partly defined by its immediacy, its mutability. It’s never entirely fixed in time; no performance faithfully reproduces the last. Even minute variations in performing a part can alter its reception and interpretation and yet the script always delimits possibilities. I didn’t find the ideas Kitamura’s exploring especially startling but I admired her creative decisions, her deft approach to her subject matter. Her plot is fairly minimal yet there were times when I found the tension, the creeping disorientation gripping, almost excruciating. Overall, not desperately groundbreaking, but ambitious and intelligent enough to make for satisfying reading.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Fern Press for an ARC

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update : Now shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025

The world would be a better place if every midlife crisis could be solved with a little bit of playacting that shows whether what is missing in our lives can live up to the fiction we created.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting project but this is exactly the type of solipsistic literary fiction that I’m sick to death of reading. I don’t deny that it would probably be satisfying to puzzle over this book’s structure but I’m finding I just have no desire to do that. Onto the next thing.

[Mai H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full disclosure, I have trouble with Riverhead books. While I enjoy them, I don't think I'm smart enough for them. I recognize the majority of them are extremely well written, and I connect with parts of them, but they don't feed me, if that makes sense.

I love Manhattan. I love Asian diaspora lit. I love messy families and confusing truths. I much preferred the first half of this book to the second. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the second half. I just didn't quite connect with it, and that's fine. This is almost evocative of EXHIBIT, also by the same publisher, which I felt similarly about.

📖 Gifted by Viv

[Daniel Shindler · Rating 5 out of 5]

A haze of impending danger hovers in the air during the opening scene of “ Audition.”

“ It seemed an unlikely choice, this large establishment in the financial district, so that I stood outside and checked the address, the name of the restaurant, I wondered if I had made a mistake. But then I saw him through the window, seated at a table at the back of the dining room.I stared through the layers of glass and reflection, the frame of my own face. Something uncoiled in my stomach, slow and languorous, and I decided it would be better if I left now and did not go in to him.”

The unnamed narrator is unequivocal in articulating her dread and anxiety as she approaches this meeting.She is meeting Xavier. She is a well known actress.He is a young graduate student who suspects a biological connection to the narrator. As the narrator stands outside the restaurant, peering through the window sight unseen, she is deciding what type of role or face she might present to the young student. This scene is a signature Kitamura moment.Performance and playacting to fulfill a role are recurring themes in Kitamura’s novels. Casting an actor as narrator and protagonist immediately draws attention to the role of presentation and deceit in public and private lives. The author cleverly designs a novel in two parts, mirroring the structure of a two act play, depicting struggles with performance and personal misgivings.

Everyone in the novel is playing a part, creating scenes of unraveling mystery that cast doubt about what motives and actions are real and which are performative masks.Kitamura’s prose is spare, piercing and exploratory.It delivers thoughts in sentences that sometimes run on while abruptly veering in different directions and time frames. The result is an aura of psychological uncertainty and tension as relations between the narrator, her husband Tomas and Xavier morph in mood and roles throughout.

There is a startling shift of circumstance in the second act of the novel.Although the transition is abrupt, Kitamura’s thematic signposts tie the two sections together.At its core, the novel is an exploration of public performance and how it affects personal and intimate relationships. The face one presents to the world diverges from the inner self that each person harbors.Kitamura asks many questions about the gap between our inner selves and the roles we play for others. The author does not offer solutions. Instead, she leaves readers embroiled in the mysteries confronting our protagonists. Each reader might have a different solution.Many will be enriched for having engaged in the search.

[Ernst · Rating 5 out of 5]

Da ich gerade einen weiteren Roman von Kitamura angefangen habe (Intimitäten), wollte ich nun nach einem Monat noch etwas ausführlichere Eindrücke von Die Probe festhalten:

Ich mochte an diesem Roman das Gesamtpaket, die gehobene sprachliche Verarbeitung, den rätselhaften Inhalt und die völlig unerwarteten Wendungen, die manchmal ins Surreale übergehen. Wegen dieses gesamten Lesegenusses von der ersten bis zur letzten Seite habe ich die volle Punktzahl vergeben und gleich ein weiteres Kitamura-Buch bestellt.
Zum Inhalt will ich hier nicht allzu viel sagen, am besten man weiß nicht viel, dann bleibt die Spannung am größten.

Super finde ich, wie Kitamura mit diesen Antipoden umgeht, einerseits diese präzisen Beobachtungen der Hauptfigur, die als professionelle Schauspielerin geübt darin ist auch noch dem rudimentärsten mimischen Ausdruck Botschaften zu entnehmen, gleichzeitig ist sie bzw. sind auch alle anderen höchst unzuverlässige Erzählerinnen. Daraus entsteht eine magische Spannung, die bis zur letzten Seite hält. Lässt sich außerdem sehr flüssig an einem langen Nachmittag lesen.


Ursprüngliche Eindrücke vom 2.11.25
Das Leben als inszeniertes Theaterstück?
Kann im Moment noch gar nicht viel sagen, bin total geflashed. So gut geschrieben, so unerwartete Wendungen, am Ende angekommen, fange ich sofort wieder zu blättern an, Moment mal, wo war die eine Stelle noch mal, wie hat sie das genau formuliert …
Ein ganz starkes Stück Literatur.

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

High concept, structurally complex literary fiction is so tricky. It tends to send readers in drastically different directions in response. And this will be one of those for sure. It's a book that deliberately makes the narrative more obscure, more confusing rather than offering the gradual increase in clarity we expect from a novel. I loved it.

At one point, near the end of a novel, is a scene so baffling that I could have responded with anger and frustration. At this moment, as a reader, you simply must surrender to the book. You can no longer fight it, no longer try to impose your own expectations on it. You have to give up and say, "I have no idea what you are actually doing here, Katie Kitamura, and I think that is the point." Or at least, I did. Does that sound terrible? I suppose it does. I admit that I often enjoy novels that work as puzzles to be solved, and the idea of one that refuses any kind of clear solution can be a real frustration. But one of the things about my brain that works so hard and loves sussing things out is that it also loves to just stop and give up and let go for a little while. By refusing to be solved, this book just let me have an experience. And that is, ultimately, the thing I want most from a novel.

At the heart of all of this is so much about art, about performance, about perception. Secrets and long relationships. The choices we make and the paths we never took. It is not that I think Kitamura wants to give us any particular theme or insight around these topics, instead she teases them out, lets us consider them, lets us see just how much we know and then takes it all away from you.

Her prose, as always, is beautiful, spare, propulsive. It made me want to go back and reread INTIMACIES, which I enjoyed very much. And honestly I would not be surprised if I sit down with this one again to see what experience I have next time.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) Audition opens in a restaurant, where our narrator – a successful, well-established actress – is having dinner with a younger man. The nature of their relationship is ambiguous, but she’s convinced onlookers assume she’s paid him to be there (although in true Kitamura style, it’s not at all clear whether anyone is really thinking this. The line between perception and projection is smudged beyond recognition – something that’s spelled out when the narrator pulls up the memory of a time, years ago, when she was mistaken for an escort while dining with her father).

We soon learn that the young man, Xavier, initially approached the actress with a misunderstanding about their connection to each other. This is (seemingly) quickly dispensed with; still, she doesn’t dismiss him outright, and he becomes a sort of avatar for existing anxieties around her career and life choices. The narrator is in the middle of rehearsals for a play, and much of her energy is focused on her inability to grasp a transformative scene. Then there’s a break in the novel in which she seems to nail it; she goes from frustration to enlightenment without us seeing anything of how she achieves that. Except that isn’t all that’s changed. Her family is mysteriously transformed.

If Kitamura’s work might already be described as a fiction of overthinking, Audition takes her characters’ trademark maladaptive daydreaming to its not-so-logical conclusion. Lines blur between performance and reality, art and truth – between one’s real life and a what-could-have-been version of it spun out from a fleeting thought. So thick are the layers of meaning, so stark the gaps in any explanation offered, that it’s difficult to discern whether we are being presented with an elaborate roleplaying exercise, a deep-rooted delusion, a thought experiment or an alternate reality. No answer is forthcoming. The gaps are part of the architecture.

And yet, for all its conceptual ambition, Audition fell a little flat for me. Maybe that was inevitable – I’ve been really impressed by the two Kitamura books I’ve read so far, and this one has been hyped as a breakthrough moment, a new peak. Expectations were, possibly, too high. I still think she’s a phenomenal stylist, and no one writes obsessive rumination quite like her, but the high concept here works against her usual strengths. Compared to A Separation and, especially, Intimacies, Audition feels thinner. Kitamura thrives on the friction between people, the way perception warps in relation to others; here, that interplay is transposed onto big, splashy themes rather than playing out a hundred little times in minor interactions.

There’s plenty to chew on, as always with this author, but Audition left me hungry for something more substantial. Kitamura’s best work burrows deep into psychological ambiguity while still maintaining a strong sense of narrative momentum; here, the ambiguity feels untethered, the story fragmented to the point of weightlessness. That’s the point of course, and I did find it interesting to read something more postmodern from Kitamura – this makes a lot of sense as a direction for her work, and framing the story within a performance theme is really clever. I just found the core questions of the novel less appealing than the broader-ranging, yet more intimate, concerns of A Separation and Intimacies, both of which I’d recommend above this.

I received an advance review copy of Audition from the publisher through Edelweiss.

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I would say that the book has been designed to be read in several ways. So, as you said, it could be upside down or it could be right side up, and that was the great pleasure and, in a way, trick of writing the book. I’ve come to see it almost as a bit of a Rorschach blot: which side of the book readers think is true, or right side up, versus which is upside down says something about their own desires. What do you want to be true? What do you prefer to be a fantasy? That was one of my endeavors in writing the book—so it’s not really an either-or but both. I’m so conscious of the fact that when I read, my own desires as a reader are radically shaping the book. [Laughs.]”
~ Katie Kitamura for The New Yorker

Beware. (And please excuse my language.)

“Audition” is a mind f**k of the highest order.

A high-octane conceptual exercise.

A megawatt dialectic ballet. A minefield.

I read in a state of utter confusion, constantly doubting myself, searching for clues, scanning for signs, signifiers, anything to give shape to the ever-shifting narrative. Only to end up bruised and battered on the curb.

Then I sat with it. And I read the Katie Kitamura interview. And then my own interpretation of the Rorschach ink blots came slowly into view, assigning my own meaning to the text. Concocting my own proof of life.

But as delicate and infinitely clever the literary exercise was, the whole experience remained just that for me: an exercise. A highly intellectual experiment. An assignment.

I remained in the audience the whole time, outside looking in, painfully aware that I was the observer, the reader, the decipherer. A thrill certainly. But a bitterly cold one.

Reading “Audition” felt like slipping and sliding on a frozen lake, when all I really wanted was to find a fire underneath all this ice.

[Katia N]

Having finished reading this novel, I was thinking of a totally different writer I have admired, Naiyer Masud. Though he is not widely known and writes in Urdu, he is incomparable stylist and his elliptic stories have totally ‘invaded’ my imagination. His way of writing is composing the whole story with intricate plot and the level of details and then taking out a big chunk of the whole before finishing it. The effect of these 'holes' in the narrative is disorienting, seducing and almost etherial. He was explaining how it works through the following parable:

There was this woman who was an accomplished cook. A certain dish that required only four ounces of ghee she’d cook with two-and-a-half pounds of ghee, removing the extra when it was done. But the dish tasted very special and retained the flavour, the essence of the finest dish from the table of the nobility.

In this novel, i think Kitamura has tried something similar: to deliberately keep out the essential parts of her story in order to enhance the atmosphere and disorientate her reader, take him out of the comfort zone and create a memorable experience. But in my view she has ‘overcooked’. And it is not the problem that she has taken too much out. The problem that whatever has stayed did not add up into 'a noble dish’ for me in spite of a lot of sophisticated tricks and signposting.

The main character who is also a narrator is an actor by profession based in New York. The novel consists of two parts. In fact they are two very distinctive narratives involving the same characters. And intentionally so.

I’ve enjoyed the first part. It probed the psychology of acting and of an actress: what does it mean to successfully impersonate someone else for the sake of art? How does it feel to be an actor? She comes up with some profound insights:

Although every beat of the scene was tightly scripted, I felt as if I had an infinite amount of time, I moved at my leisure. And while I hit my marks and cues, never deviating from the script, I was not in control of what took place, there was an alchemical process by which the scene unfolded, mysterious even to me and Max. In those moments, I was in communion with something, some force that was larger than myself and the scope of my ordinary life..

The question has lead me towards more universal query: how often a human being ‘performs’ in real life rather than presenting her true self into the world. Is there even such thing as a true self. I also caught myself thinking of the english phrase ‘acting naturally’. If one think of it properly she would realised that it is an oxymoron. I tried to translate it into the other languages i know. And it simply does not translate. Maybe one might trace. this to a character trait of an English speaking person... But i am digressing. Let’s come back to the novel.

In fact, this part is digressive in style. It seems Kitamura is inspired by Javier Marias style with his focus on minute gesture, perceived physiology of his characters and lengthy digressions into his narrator’s thoughts. I think Marias in his turn was inspired by Henry James. And there are shades of of both of them Kitamura’s writing in this part (not in terms of the elegancy of the sentences though. Her best sentences are sparse.) She also tends to ‘tell not show’ instead of the opposite ‘show not to tell’, the way of writing any english speaking child should pick up at school aged five. That is why I always find ‘telling’ in fiction more refreshing, almost to the point of being ‘experimental’.

Another subject matter that is dealt in this part is perceived ambivalence of the main characters to the whole issue of having children. I thought the sense of baby’s anticipation by a male partner and the aftermath of miscarriage both were dealt rather poignantly.

So i was settled into a contemplative novel. But rather abruptly i was thrown out of it with the second part. The style has changed and the plot quickly turned into itself into something akin to a thriller. The psychology of acting was shelved (apart from the very beginning). It seemed the narrative has become overloaded with the tropes of a genre fiction. I won’t list them not to spoil ‘the plot’, but many of them are painfully familiar. The characters have become very different people in all but their names.

It was of course a very deliberate decision by the author. I was dreading how she would connect those two parts as they were so disparate. And she did go by the easiest way possible: a production of play within the play and ‘a woman who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real.’ A snake biting his tale so to speak. It has been done so many times before with so much more elegance (Poe, Cortazar, Borges etc, etc. etc.) At least she had a mercy just to hint, not explicitly say what her characters were really up to in the second part. So all her readers including me can indulge themselves in “interpreting” her text.

In the first part there is a scene where our actor is having a conversation with her playwright.

Max (the play writer) was looking at me but when I stared back her face closed down a little, as if she had been confronted, and I knew then that she had no idea what she had written, no idea of how it would work in the play, how it would bridge the two versions of the character, the scene she had written was nothing more than a placeholder. She had grown bored of the character in the midst of writing, I realized, and wanted to write a different character, and so had created this impossible scene to segue between not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether. I could see it now, I could see it all over the writing.

It has exactly described my impression of Kitamura and her characters. And i was thinking: was it ironic or was it meta-fictional? In fact there was even more succinct diagnoses imbedded in the text: Weakness of interpretation which were in fact weakness in the writing.

Let’s interpret this generously and say it was a conceit. Then in my view, it was a a little too clever for its own good and instead of introducing ‘a lacuna’ into the coherent text, it has created a ‘placeholder’. The overall result seems a little too pretentious.

So after finishing the book, initially anger was percolating through me, a series of small internal eruptions. (using Kitamura’s interesting turn of the phrase). But then i was just thinking of a waisted opportunity to go dipper in the actor’s craft.

Having said all of that, I can see that this author tries to experiment with both style and themes much more than many others. I feel guilty as I might come across of discouraging her of doing so. That is not my intention. I might try her earlier novels one day as they received a positive feedback from people whose taste I admire.

Ps
Trigger warning for people who find a bohemian life style in modern New York insufferable. I am sure it was the part of the character’s credibility. Still, I found quite a bit irritating the repetitive references to procuring pastries from the nearest cafe for breakfast with a spouse, bringing it home and considering this as an acumen of intimacy aged forty nine.

PS2
This has been nominated on the Booker. I've read just three out of this year list. I was amazed how easy was to read them. It did not require any effort whatsoever. In one word they were "readable". I guess that is the purpose of the prize to make people read fiction. And all three of them venture into the territory bordering thrillers in a way how they are written: (pacy plot, noting what it seems, cutbacks and cinematic tricks). I am not sure whether it is a theme of the long-list or a theme of the modern novels that moved away from auto-fictional interiority. It is just an observation as I do not plan to pursue booker novels further.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Generally I was confused and irritated reading this story, particularly in the second half of the book. I decided to seek out clarity by reading other reviews here on Goodreads…but it’s all way too smart for me as I’m still scratching my head with confusion!

[Linda - on 2 week hiatus! · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. This book was an experience. 🎭

It’s one of those quiet, cerebral novels where you’re not entirely sure what’s happening — but you feel it deep down.

The story follows an actress whose life begins to blur with her performance, and reality slowly unravels around her. It’s about identity, performance, and the strange ways we play roles even in real life.

I’ll be honest — I didn’t always “get it,” but I was fascinated the whole way through. It’s haunting, layered, and oddly hypnotic. One of those books that sticks with you even if you can’t quite explain why.

Maybe not a masterpiece for everyone… but definitely a masterpiece of its kind.

[Anita Pomerantz · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be honest, I think I need to re-read section 1 of this book before I make a total assessment. I also should warn you; I think a lot of people will not like this one. It's very unclear what exactly happens. It's like a literary puzzle. Personally, I love books like this. Ones where I feel engaged while reading it, but then I have to figure out what the author intended. But I also see how it can be completely frustrating. Would absolutely love to read this for a face to face book club. I definitely have theories! I want to re-read parts of the first section to see if there are clues and foreshadowing I may have missed.

The main character is an actress and the entire book is written from her perspective. I believe her to be an unreliable narrator, but that's an interpretation that's up for grabs. As the story progresses we have more and more insight into the family dynamic between her, her husband, Tomas, and her adult son, Xavier. It's a bit dark and definitely artsy. A Hot Milk kind of vibe without the great setting.

UPDATE: After reading this one, I re-visited it on audio. It totally stood up to a re-read, and I actually appreciated all the more the second time around. I had a theory in my mind after the first read, and I felt more secure in my interpretations. I think there are some really excellent observations about life, family relationships, and more. Totally convinced this one was worthy of it's Booker nomination. I love books like this one - - ones that make you really think and where the reader brings their own view of life to the book. I could read it again.

[Barbara K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fine example of what a gifted author can achieve in a relatively short book. The style is experimental, to which the story is well suited. I’m not sure how it would have held up in a longer book, although I suspect that Kitamura’s sentences and word choices would be impressive in any format. (The structure of some sentences may send up alarms for the grammar police, but in context they are perfectly communicative.)

To describe the events in the book in any detail at all would be to deny other readers the opportunity to discover it themselves. It is a novel that needs to be experienced as much as read, since we are uncertain about exactly what is happening through much of the book. I found myself becoming tense and impatient through the first part, but then Kitamura turns the story on its head and I was quickly committed to reading through to the end.

What is it about? Acting, and relationships, and how the two intertwine. To what extent are our relationships, even with those we know best, performances?

When the main character, reflects “Without intentionality, there was no agency, no control, the work was happening to you. An impossible inversion.” she is ostensibly addressing her work as an actress. But she is also commenting on her relationship with her husband and others.

She reflects on the effects of her own aging thus: “It had been a heedless moment. I had entered the stage of life where there is a certain amount of immutability, in middle age, change is experienced primarily as a kind of attrition.”

The book presents many layers, layers to the MC and to her relationships with the most important persons in her life. It leaves much for a reader to ponder.

[Emmeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked Intimacies.

This was me reading Audition:

Part 1: Excited—ah yes—ooh—so what—so what—so what—so what—Ah, I do like theatre.

Part 2: Oh that’s unexpected! —but so what—so what—so what—honestly does this woman have no personality at all? —so what—rage—rage—I DON’T CARE.

It is 2025 and things are going badly all over the world. I am a believer that the personal is political. I am by no means saying that every book should be a political screed. For that matter, I'm not sure any novel should be a political screed. But possibly, due to the state of everything, the bar is slightly higher to qualify as a "book" for me. This is an elegant thought experiment, explored via a somewhat experimental structure whilst employing standard minimalist American-style prose. It is about an actress and her husband living in New York. They have almost no defining features and everything revolves on some minute decisions made in the past. Due to the experimental structure, there is no possible resolution.

I need more.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Update 9/'25 ... Since I had read this back in April prior to its Booker nomination, and due to having a mind like a sieve, I wanted to give it a reread, to make sure I wasn't missing something that first time around. If anything, I was somewhat LESS impressed this time - it really is rather a 'one-trick pony', and the twist is neither that original nor awe-inspiring and the author does little enough with it. Also, never having been a parent (except to my fur babies), I didn't much relate to all the mishegoss over the trials and tribulations of being such.

PS: Interesting that THREE of the Booker noms this year center on adoption/abortion plotlines (the other two being Love Forms and Flashlight) - none of the three being anywhere near as good as the book about that which SHOULD have been longlisted: Ripeness.

3.5, rounded down.

I didn't love this as much as I thought I would - the more it went on, the less enchanted I became, as it seemed overly 'constructed' for my taste. Once I got the basic gist, it kind of got bogged down and I wanted it to do something more than keep repeating the same basic tropes over and over. And with my theatre background, I was much more engaged with Part 1, which centered on that milieu, which kind of disappeared in Part 2 in favor of the family dynamics.

In an odd way, it reminded me of Strangers, which also centers on a strange and somewhat mystical parent/child relationship.

[Vivian · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really can't find one redeeming thing to say about this book. Kitamura was perhaps trying to capture the inherent deceit and performance of existence, but unfortunately the approach was not executed well. The two parts never connected in any meaningful way for me, and I felt like I knew absolutely nothing substantial about the narrator despite having read nearly two hundred pages from her pov by the end. This book was definitely trying to be clever but it just wasn't

[Akankshya · Rating 1 out of 5]

I like to think I like unconventional fiction, and then this type of abstract litfic rolls along. I have nothing good to say.