Who Am I?

This Booker Prize-shortlisted novel walks a tight-rope between identity—real and imagined

- Debanjan Dhar

IN Katie Kitamura's new novel, Audition, a stranger walks into the unnamed narrator’s life, claiming to be her son.

An actress stuck in rehearsal-limbo, the protagonist initially dismisses Xavier's theory. She maintains she had aborted, that the journalist interviewing her on her personal life made an error. But Xavier's beliefs unavoidably snake in, inextricable from her professional anxieties. Audition unfolds as a deliberately airless monologue, the middle-aged actress steering us through projections favouring her side of the tale.

To saunter into this novel's tautly clenched psychodrama is to concede to its manipulations, bold provocations. As Kitamura unleashes a vortex of debates around authenticity of account and performance, her heroine’s version increasingly loosens in an amoral web. By turns, Audition slithers like an archetypal stranger-in-the-woods riff and a twisted family undoing.

The novel opens with an expanded set of hypothesis. To a passerby, how would the meeting between the narrator and the twenty-something Xavier look? Kitamura floats various fantasies but she has a wilder trick in store. In this dance between reality and illusion, no singular assertion sustains.

Among the actress, her husband and Xavier, their claims keep shredding till we no longer know whom to turn to.

When we meet the narrator, she’s struggling with a particular point in her new play, The Opposite Shore. It’s a moment of metamorphosis where her character takes off. The playwright, Max, insists, “It’s the moment where she locates her emotion, where the play breaks open, when she steps forward into life”. But the narrator is in knots over how to approach it and tackle it. An actress who has had considerable success, she is, however, limited by her racial identity. This project is a promising one and if it lands right, she can revitalise her career.