Audition by Katie Kitamura

Life has been hectic so the blog has been slow/dormant for a few months. Despite my silence, I’ve been reading a decent amount and trying to go into Booker season with more books under my belt. Audition has been getting some very mixed reviews and I know quite a few people who hated it and abandoned it. Keep reading for my review. Will this make my prediction list for this year’s Booker longlist?

Audition by Katie Kitamura
Published: April 2025 by Riverhead books
Reviewed by: Jen
Rating: ★★★★
Find it here: Audition

I enjoy ambiguous books where the author leaves it up the reader to interpret the meaning behind the narrative. Audition is a short but dense novel by American author Katie Kitamura. Kitamura certainly doesn’t provide the reader with many answers in her latest book. Instead she leaves the reader with loose ends, many questions, and in the some cases a feeling of unease and confusion.

As a psychologist in real life, I sit with ambiguity every day, and questions of roles and identity are comfortable for me because I think about them quite frequently. In high school and college, I was pretty engaged in theater. I performed in community theater and was accepted to a performing arts college before my parents pushed me into a “legitimate (their words)” college. So the themes in Audition are ones that I connected with on a very personal level.

In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Kitamura writes that interpretation is at the heart of Audition and she leaves that interpretation up to the reader. She states,

“The first scene is quite important to the novel because the pair at the heart of the novel, the narrator and this younger man, become an object that is looked at by many different people, all of them interpreting the nature of their relationship differently. I’m very preoccupied by interpretation.”

The ways in which we, the readers, interpret the relationships in Audition says a lot about our own judgments and personal experiences. And they guide our experience of the novel and what we make of how the narrative shifts in part two of the book.

Audition is a dense novel in terms of ideas and themes but quite sparse in terms of physical space/narrative — in some ways it’s like a minimalist set where the action is centered on the individual and her relationship to others and herself. What I found particularly enjoyable about the book is that it made me reflect on how so much of our behavior balances so precariously on the role we are playing in any one moment in time, and how we can slide in and out of those roles with little effort. Audition asks the question “who or what is the real self?”

“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. You observe yourself, you watch yourself act, you hear yourself speak, a line that is articulated and then articulated again, and the meaning that is produced is at once entirely real—as it is experienced on stage, as it is experienced by the audience—and also the predictable result of your craft, the choices you have made, the control that cedes freedom.” Audition

Audition is beautifully written, maddeningly frustrating, and brilliantly reflective. It is the sort of book that will likely frustrate many readers and will require multiple readings. In many ways, it’s a novel that is like projective test – the ways in which you interpret the narrative likely say as much about you as it does about the main character.

I loved the book and it will likely make my list of Booker longlist predictions. People will either love or hate this book, it’s not likely to leave people feeling lukewarm.

Want to try it for yourself? You can find a copy here: Audition

We want to hear from you! Have you read this book? What did you think?