Katie Kitamura's new novel finds the theater of everyday deception
In "L'Audition," the New York-based novelist stages a single restaurant encounter to unsettle the line between performance and life. She presents the book this weekend at the Livre sur les quais festival in Morges.
A woman waits at a table in a New York restaurant for a younger man whose exact relationship to her is never made clear. She is an actress, on stage and screen, and repeatedly notes her own "middle" age and the years separating her from the man across the table, according to Le Temps. From that single scene, Katie Kitamura builds what the Swiss daily calls a fascinating and devious narrative, one that reads the whole of contemporary life as a kind of performance.
Le Temps describes the novel, published in French as "L'Audition," as holding up a mirror to a society of appearances and masks, where everyone seems to be playing a part, as if on a theater stage. The uncertainty over who the young suitor is to the narrator becomes the engine of the book: is he a lover, a son, a stranger auditioning for a role neither of them has named.
Kitamura is presenting the book this weekend at the Livre sur les quais festival in Morges, which runs from September 4 to 6, Le Temps notes.
Sources
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