When Katie Kitamura published her novel “Audition” last year, many readers were caught off guard by the way the book undermines everything they thought they had understood, pulling the rug right out from under them.
An actress in New York, a young man who enters her life, a husband who punishes her with a daily ritual, and two versions of reality that cannot be reconciled with each other. The book made the best-of-the-year lists of numerous respected publications and was among Barack Obama’s favorites.
The internationally acclaimed author is visiting Greece this month for two events in collaboration with the Hellenic American Union. She appeared in Athens on Wednesday, June 24 (at the Hellenic American Union Theater at 7:00 PM) and at the Chania Book Festival on Thursday, June 25. Shortly before her arrival, we spoke about her work (available in Greek from Dioptra publishing house), about the risk she took in writing it, and about how a documentary featuring Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek first brought her to the Mani region years ago.
Let’s talk about “Audition,” a book that surprised many readers with its structure. Did you have it clearly mapped out from the start, or did it emerge as you were writing?
“It definitely wasn’t there from the beginning. I had written maybe thirty or forty pages, and the only way I can describe it is that I felt like I was driving down a straight, well-lit road and could see my destination. I knew exactly how to get there. But I believe that’s not how any book gets written. So I took a step back and tried to think about what I really wanted to say. What interests me is the sense that within certain universal experiences there are these unbridgeable, asymmetrical dimensions, contradictions that cannot be explained. I thought I could either write about that, or embed it within the very structure of the book itself.
That’s when the idea of a split reality came to me: two parts of a book closely linked to each other, yet separated by a contradiction. It was a leap of faith. As I was writing the novel, I kept thinking: ‘I know how to write the normal version. If this doesn’t work, if it fails, I’ll go back and do it that way.’ That was very reassuring. It created a kind of safety net.
A writer has certain tools at their disposal, and I knew I hadn’t worked enough with form, or at least not as much as I wanted to. So it was an opportunity to ask whether structure and form can take on some of the work we usually assign to plot. Can structure generate tension and momentum?”
Were there reactions to the novel that surprised you?
“Yes. Identification is a very interesting thing in novels, which character the reader will identify with. It’s usually the protagonist, especially in a first-person narrative. And for me, obviously, because it’s a story with motherhood and artistic creation at its core, the point of identification is the narrator. When I was on tour for the book, which has been out for over a year now, I met quite a few people for whom that point was Xavier, the young man. For them, it was absolutely a book about being raised, not about raising children. That was a surprise to me, and it’s also deeply moving.
The other day I did a reading in Philadelphia and a young man came up and said: ‘This book helped me understand my mother. I feel like I now understand certain sides of her better than I did when I was younger.’ I felt enormously lucky to have readers like that, because it really is a book that becomes as good as the reader brings to it. When you have a reader willing to bring their whole self to the act of reading, you get back a much more interesting book.”
What qualities do you think make a reader good? Empathy? An open mind? Curiosity?
“Everything you mentioned is exactly what I hope to be as a reader myself. For me, reading is the most optimistic thing I do every day. Every time I read a book, I open myself to another mind in a truly deep, intimate way. That requires a great deal of optimism. When I’m a good reader, I maintain that sense of openness and bring my whole self to the reading. I also think I’ve become a better reader because over the years I’ve come to understand how much I myself shape the work I’m reading. A book is truly made between reader and author. When you read a piece of writing, eighty percent of what you experience is your own response. The text is incredibly malleable, very unstable.
There are wonderful books that, when you reread them, feel different because you have become a different person. The example I always give is Henry James’s ‘The Portrait of a Lady.’ Every time I read it, I feel completely differently. Right now I’m returning to Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ I last read it about twenty years ago, and it’s a very different book now that I’m reading it in my forties compared to my twenties. But it doesn’t even need that much time to pass. If I read a book while distracted or without caffeine, it’s something different from what I read when I’m focused and well-rested.”
You write a great deal about the roles we play in our own lives. When in your own life did you first realize that there is a performative dimension to our behavior?
“This idea is really at the heart of the book, but it’s very present in the previous two as well. The idea of performance, but in a way that touches on aspects of everyday life and how we understand who we are in the world. I first became aware of it when I had children. We’re told that being a mother is the most natural, the most instinctive thing in the world.
In reality, I don’t think that’s true at all. I believe people learn to become mothers and learn to become fathers. When my children were very young, I realized that I, along with many people around me, was reproducing a model of motherhood based on what we had seen in culture or in our environment. I don’t think that’s a negative thing, even though it may sound that way. I believe it’s part of the human condition.
I don’t know if this happens in Greece, but in the United States when you take your child to the pediatrician, they ask: ‘Does your child engage in pretend play? Does he or she play doctor, mother, teacher?’ If your child doesn’t do that, the doctors get concerned and refer you for further evaluation. Role-play is considered absolutely essential to identity formation. And then it’s fascinating how, when we grow up, that stops, and suddenly performance or role-playing is seen as suspicious. Yet we know it’s fundamental to how we learn to exist in the world. I’m also very interested in the idea that at some point your identity solidifies and stops changing. That strikes me as a lie. People keep changing, and their roles in relation to others keep shifting. Performance is a very interesting thing to observe in terms of how it traces that continuous evolution.”
What do you admire in those who have made this human dimension their profession? Your heroine in “Audition” is an actress…
“In many actors, what I admire is their interpretive intelligence. There is a way in which actors understand story, character, and narrative that can surpass many, many writers. When you talk to an actor about a character, their grasp of what is believable, what is psychologically consistent, what would be an interesting psychological turn for the character is extraordinarily refined. There’s a reason so many actors are also writers, or are interested in writing. What they do isn’t all that different. When I was writing about acting, in many ways I was also writing about writing. Every time the heroine says something about what she thinks of acting, it gave me an opportunity to think about what writing means to me.
As for live performance itself, there’s also a kind of magical gift that’s very hard to describe. There are two dancers at New York City Ballet, Mira Nadon and Taylor Stanley, and it’s impossible to understand why you can’t stop watching them. It’s impossible to understand why you can’t look at anyone else when they’re on stage. Of course they are technically exceptional, but it’s something more, an inexplicable displacement. In moments like that, you think: artificial intelligence is not going to replace certain art forms. I’m always drawn to those moments where you have an art that is actually very constrained and demands enormous discipline, and from that emerges something that takes you by surprise.”
Can you tell us anything about the film adaptation of “Audition”?
“Not a lot. It’s being directed by Lulu Wang, a wonderful, intelligent filmmaker. She made ‘The Farewell.’ I admire her work enormously. She has an incredibly clear vision. She had taken on the project well before the book came out, so from the start she had a very specific sense of what she wanted to do, who she wanted in the film, who to write the screenplay, everything. She’s one of those people who executes perfectly what they say they’re going to do. The film has an excellent cast of very interesting actors (Lucy Liu and the rapidly rising Charles Melton will star), and the screenplay is being written by the director and a wonderful American playwright, Martyna Majok.”
I have to ask you about “A Separation,” which will be republished in Greek in September. Most of it takes place in Greece, specifically in the Mani, and is set during a difficult period for Greeks, the years of the financial crisis. What drew you to that backdrop? And the lament singers mentioned in the book?
“The husband, the character in the novel who goes to the Mani for research for his book, is there to study the region’s lament singers and the rituals of mourning. I was working at the time on a documentary, a series about psychoanalysis in cinema, presented by Slavoj Zizek and directed by a close friend of mine, Sophie Fiennes. I don’t think the lament singers ended up in the documentary in the end, but that’s what originally brought me to the Mani. We were filming there for about two weeks and I had such a strong sense of a story I wanted to write, inspired by the landscape, which is so evocative, as you know. That’s where the book came from. I’ve never been to a tourist island, so that version of Greece I don’t know at all.”
You’ll get a taste of that this time around, going to Chania.
“Yes. But that part of the Mani was utterly magical to me. In many ways, that book led in some sense to the novel I wrote after it, ‘Intimacies,’ which is set at the International Court of Justice in The Hague and is concerned with the failure of some of those postwar idealistic projects. ‘Intimacies’ is set just before the Brexit vote, and captures the feeling that the dream of the European Union is rapidly under enormous strain. It observes an institution that is admirable in many ways, but also has many weaknesses. What interested me was how these large-scale historical events filter into the background of a small story.
The other thing was that the fires that summer in Greece were particularly bad. At the time I wrote the book, the sense of wildfires and the climate crisis wasn’t as sharp in the American imagination as it is now. Today, in the American imagination, the idea that these beautiful landscapes we associate with leisure, beauty, fantasy, and dreams, the California landscape for example, are burning, is something everyone thinks about constantly. But back then, there was something disturbing about driving through fields that had been completely burned. Seeing scorched earth shook me. There’s actually no correlation between wildfires and an economic crisis, but there was something in that feeling of impending catastrophe that touched me.”
I wanted to ask you about your friendship with the famous Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. He appears in the acknowledgments of “A Separation,” and I believe there’s a blurb of his on “Intimacies.” How did you meet? Is he someone who reads your books before they’re published?
“Karl Ove has published my books. He has a publishing house in Norway, and that’s how we met. He bought the rights to my second novel, and at that point they sent me a copy of the first volume of ‘My Struggle,’ which had just been translated into English. Nobody was reading it yet, it hadn’t become a literary phenomenon. I was on vacation with some friends, in a house full of writers, and everyone kept asking: ‘What are you reading?’ I’d say: ‘Something I can’t put down. I haven’t figured out yet what makes it so exceptional, but this is some of the best writing I’ve ever read.’ We write very differently, but he has genuinely influenced me in many ways, because he is fearless. One of the things he’s not afraid of is writing a bad sentence. He changed my understanding of what good writing is. Before I encountered him and his work, I still believed that writing meant beautiful sentences. It sounds completely naive to say it, but I believed it. He freed me from the fear of writing a bad sentence, or a bad paragraph, or even a bad book. A writer’s ambition has to go much deeper than that. That’s something he truly taught me.”
