(Audio) Book Review: Audition by Katie Kitamura

I received an Advance Listening Copy of this book thanks to Libro.fm and the publisher. All opinions are my own.

Audition was less than 5 hours to listen to but was a book that kept me thinking about it far longer afterward. In the first half, the narrator, a woman somewhere probably in her 50s, meets a man at a restaurant. She is uncomfortable and reluctant to meet. He is handsome, a little brash, and much younger. Young enough to be her son. What is their relationship?

In the second half we meet all the same characters but their relationships to each other has changed massively. What is the truth? Whose reality is this? And are we seeing things as they truly are?

This is a book where tiny details are lingered over. The way a character’s hand might hover as they reach to pick up a cup. The placement of a desk in a room, or a pile of books. The tiny expressions on someone else’s face when we talk to them. Our narrator’s mind flickers back over memories of her youth. She is now a fairly successful actress but she remembers some of the roles that were hers when she was younger, a dinner at a restaurant with her father. Sometimes this sort of slow, panning view of a scene can be frustrating when we as the reader want the plot to progress, but it was hard not to admire Kitamura’s restraint and careful rate of revelation. Every detail feels so carefully thought out and plotted. After I finished listening to the audio version, I couldn’t resist flipping back through a print version to find the links I remembered between various scenes.

Two of my co-workers also listened to the book at the same time and there was so much we had to say, so many theories we had each developed, that we ended up going out for a meal in order to hash it all out.