{"id":810,"date":"2026-04-05T13:23:42","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T13:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/?p=810"},"modified":"2026-04-05T13:23:42","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T13:23:42","slug":"when-all-the-worlds-a-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/05\/when-all-the-worlds-a-stage\/","title":{"rendered":"When all the world’s a stage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Book<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

<\/a>Audition<\/a> by Katie Kitamura<\/a>

My rating: 2 of 5 stars<\/a>


I went through a period where I loved the work of the 20th-century French author Alain Robbe-Grillet<\/a>, who wrote The Voyeur<\/a>, Jealousy<\/a>, and The Erasers<\/a>, along with the screenplay for the 1961 Alain Resnais film Last Year at Marienbad<\/em>. Robbe-Grillet posited that you can never truly know anyone, including yourself, and his writing consisted of detached observations and complex, twisted circumstances, often with different versions presented so that the reader is never quite sure what happened or, often, who the characters really are. His writing prompts you to question who you yourself are and whether you really can know anyone else.

Katie Kitamura<\/a> plays in similar territory in Audition<\/a>, but she tackles this problem by employing the trope of alternate realities. The book is divided into two sections, with one involving a young man who believes the narrator may be his mother and another in which he is her son. She is an actress, and in the first part she struggles with a role, unable to connect, while in the second she masters it and the play becomes a hit. Her marriage also functions differently in each.

In telling this story, Kitamura makes the curious choice of using a close first-person narrator. The narrator makes copious minute observations that, combined with the wooden, unnatural dialogue, make you wonder what, if any of it, really occurred.

Kitamura’s writing is careful, but the unnatural detail and clarity in which she tells her story constantly highlight the artifice in it. The narrator also has a void at her center. You don’t understand her or her motivations. The characters around her are also thin caricatures, cardboard cutouts moved around the board in different ways. The novel would have worked better for me if the characters were more fully developed, but as written it comes across as fairly shallow and meaningless. There are several allusions to identity politics, but nothing readers won’t already know, just another dimension to how people view others without really understanding them.

The theme of empty people who can’t connect is common in film, literature, and other arts. So is the idea of being an actor on the stage of life (see William Shakespeare). While there’s something to be said for a new generation discovering the artistic questions that plagued earlier generations, this is a fairly simplistic treatment. It’s not particularly thought-provoking and not very enjoyable, either. The novel amounts to a bunch of privileged people living comfortable lives in the big city, caring about little but themselves and wondering why they feel so empty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Audition by Katie Kitamura My rating: 2 of 5 stars I went through a period where I loved the work of the 20th-century French author Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote The Voyeur, Jealousy, and The Erasers, along with the screenplay for the 1961 Alain Resnais film Last Year at Marienbad. Robbe-Grillet posited that you can never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The theme of empty people who can't connect is common in film, literature, and other arts. So is the idea of being an actor on the stage of life (see William Shakespeare). There's something to be said for a new generation discovering the artistic questions that plagued earlier generations.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRPpr-d4","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=810"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":812,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions\/812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrisonwein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}