Book Review | Open-Ended Puzzle About Motherhood
Intense but restrained, this novel will make you think — not just about the plot but quite likely your own life too
While rehearsals for a play are in full swing, a young man, Xavier, seeks out an accomplished middle-aged actress and says something extremely disquieting: “I think you might be my mother.” When she is startled, he goes on to say that he was adopted and had once read an interview in which she had revealed that she had given up a child.
The actress assures him that facts had been misrepresented. You, Dear Reader, feel confused, because she notes to herself several times that that they do strongly resemble each other far beyond the physical similarities of their race. This confusion continues, even as she describes her childless existence, and the life and home she has built with her art critic husband Tomas. Sure, it’s not flawless or without betrayals, but still. It’s a full life, and a fairly content one.
Part Two of the book begins, and you expect more of the same, but you’re flung without warning into a high RPM spin: The actress suddenly is a mother, sometimes doting and sometimes distant. You’re now even more flummoxed: Is this a plot twist, a what if, is she role playing, or was she lying about her life earlier, you wonder. The actress describes her life as a mother, the pangs of jealousy she feels when she suspects her child is closer to his father — it’s a messy mixture of deep love and turmoil. Right, that’s it — no more spoilers. All that can be said is that this novel contains a mystery that you have to solve for yourself, so channel your inner Holmes, okay?
Mystery apart, it’s the other things that make this novel such an engrossing read. Like the actress’s ambitions, her reflections on her art and the workings of her craft. Her observations about how couples with yawning age gaps are seen in public are spot on: “I was a woman, after all, and for women the judgement is always harsher.” What shines through is her deep love for her husband, her experiences of middle age when life begins to shrink, and the awful solicitousness of other people that come with it. Take this bit about her son’s girlfriend: “I chafed at the part she made of me, the aging but difficult mother-in-law, she opened the door to the building for me, her arms full of food, the act ostensibly one of kindness, but in fact designed to make me feel helpless and incompetent.”
Intense but restrained, this novel will make you think — not just about the plot but quite likely your own life too.
Audition
By Katie Kitamura
Fern Press
pp. 197; Rs 999/-
