Audition
A blisteringly incisive, coolly devastating tour de force of controlled menace ... Kitamura...writes sentences that glitter with steely power and produces fiction of uncommon psychological nuance ... A radically disquieting and eerily unnerving meditation on the nature of identity and the construction of selfhood. It insistently raises questions about the things we most take for granted ... Kitamura gets behind the masks of common vision and produces fiction of visionary impact. Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.
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Kitamura excels at creating an atmosphere of foreboding, and, reading this first half, one senses that an explosive revelation must be only a few pages away ... Uncanny ... Chilling ... Kitamura’s novels tend to skim the surfaces of interpersonal relationships, offering neat snapshots rather than rich and full portraits. Reading her fiction, I often longed for more insight—not into the nature of relationships generally but into the specific people whose lives were taking shape on the page ... In her spare, cerebral novels, Kitamura reveals how much lies beneath the surfaces of our bodies and our sentences, and how much about one another we cannot know.
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Formally ambitious ... Uneventful yet ominous ... Acquires a dreamlike quality ... The sentences are sinuous, paratactic, reflecting the instability of the characters’ natures and the relations between them, allowing different possibilities to be held in tension before receding again ... Can be unsatisfying ... Kitamura transmits her characters’ discomfort to her readers, denying us the relief of immersion: we can’t be where we are, but we aren’t taken anywhere else ... Kitamura seems to have reached some kind of end point, to have exhausted the possibilities of portraying characters caught in the awareness of their own false positions ... Whether or not the reader feels a shudder of recognition, it’s unclear where the project can go from there.
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