“I had given in to his story… because of his persuasiveness – persuasion, which is only one step away from coercion.” – Audition, by Katie Kitamura
I am not suggesting that Katie Kitamura’s glittering novel is a retelling of Austen’s Persuasion. Both titles have three syllables, and that’s the extent of it, on the surface. Kitamura’s Audition centers on theater and performance, mothers and sons, and the quantity of an actor’s roles onstage and in life.
And yet the words persuasion and persuasiveness, a sly allusion to Austen’s novel, are repeated in Kitamura’s Audition. The narrator is the prey of persuasion, specifically by her husband, and she says it is “one step away from coercion.” Anne Elliot in Persuasion has a different take: she defends the act of persuasion that separated her from her lover for seven years. But that is done in a moment of malice, when her ex-lover pays the consequences of another woman’s impulsiveness.
Kitamura’s strange little book is certainly striking. The prose is spare, the sentences lyrically icy. Divided into two parts, this extraordinary novel revolves around three characters: the narrator, who is a famous actress, her husband, Tomas, a writer, and Xavier, a young man who may or may not be their son.
In Part I, the narrator struggles with her role in a play: she cannot quite get the central scene right. And then Xavier, a young man who looks like her, shows up at the theater and asks if she is his mother. (He was adopted.) She laughs; she has never given birth. But she is rattled. He looks so much like her. He gets a job as an assistant in the theater, and his personality changes. “There was no trace of the young man I had encountered only one week earlier, vibrating with uncertainty, he seemed to be a completely different person.”
In Part II, the relationships change. Xavier is now the son of the narrator and Tomas. The narrator is in a critically-acclaimed play that is finally coming to an end. Xavier works as a director’s assistant, but he has two months off and asks if he can move home. Tomas is the doting father: he persuades the narrator that there is enough space. And this is an act of persuasion she regrets. She was right to be reluctant. The results are horrifying.
I didn’t love it – I need more emotional connection – but it is a gorgeous book.
Very interesting to hear your reaction, as this is one of the Booker nominees I’ll almost certainly read (for one for one thing, it’s short!). I read Kitamura’s previous novel Intimacies a few years back (the buzz was intense); I liked it, it was definitely worth reading but — it left me emotionally a bit cold. Still, she’s a talented writer and I intended to explore her work more, with Separation being next on my Kitamura list! Guess now I’ll switch now to Audition, just to be au courant! (LOL)
That’s why I like the Booker list: it introduces me to books I would never read. And, yes, it is certainly a slim volume. 🙂