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Late in the famous novel by Katie Kitamura PrivacyThe narrator, translator of “The Court” in The Hague, is in a restaurant with his manager when a knowledge arrives and sits through the dining room. Her attention is divided between her manager in front of her, knowledge of her periphery which behaves strangely and a flow of thoughts that she cannot delete. This is one of the many moments of Privacy This captures the subtle but substantial characteristics of human interaction.
In his representations of the way in which an unexpected sentence turn, an awkward silence, an unused distraction or a change in body language can change time in a room, Kitamura is unprecedented.
HearingKitamura's fifth novel begins in a way that recalls this scene. The narrator -protagonist, an average age actor in his last phase of preparation for a new play – and fighting to obtain a central scene – arrives in a restaurant in Manhattan to meet a much younger man called Xavier. He sits at a table strangely placed between two doors and they are starting to speak. But before the conversation can settle, another man, Tomas, arrives unexpectedly and the tenor of meeting changes. In the end, we learn that the protagonist considers it as a moment after which “things were never entirely the same” for her. This simple line is sent by the meaning and the novel explores different versions and interpretations of the life of these three characters.
Kitamura's recent protagonists were translators, a role naturally adapted to his interest in apparently small breakdowns in communication between people. The work of HearingThe protagonist gives this theme a different accent: performance.
A small part of the realization of this novel is the way it makes an almost hacked trope – in which real life is “like a piece” or the actors reflect on the performance of daily life – seem completely original, and it does it through its unusual structure. HearingThe two acts explore the insecurity, the intimacies, the misunderstandings and the performances of its three central characters in the domestic and professional spheres.
The protagonist is a sharp observer, continuously noting the performance of the people around her and reflecting on the “parts” she plays and how they relate to the “whole” of her life. At one point, responding to a tense exchange on the scene that she has trouble perfecting, she rejects critical comments as performative – “a way of speaking rather than talking to each other”. However, she also read and misinterpreted the situations, and sometimes considerably reverses her positions.
In his second act, the novel generously redesigns the relationships between its central characters in a way that confuses the intrigue, even if it remains thematic and tonedly connected. Although the same tensions exist between them, the very nature of their links is redefined. For some, this may look like a frustrating act of poor direction or cunning, feeling the reader with a puzzle impossible to solve. Again Hearing is always engaging and stimulating and rewards several readings.
In a first scene, while the protagonist sits on looking at a charged rehearsal, she reflects: “There are always two stories that take place at the same time, the story inside the room and the story that surrounds it, and the border between the two is more porous than you think”. This could be an instruction to know how to read Hearing – To explore the porous links between his two acts or “stories”.
The juxtaposition of the second act also offers the surprising novel of moments of emotional weight. For example, we are witnessing a silent domestic ritual of coffee and breakfast like the backbone of a fulfilling wedding and the failure of a wedding to grow. We see the tensions resolved and exacerbated, softened and hardened.
HearingThe interest in performance takes a new layer of meaning via a striking scene in which Max, author of The Play The Protagonist is repeated – entitled The opposite bank In the first half of the novel and Rivers In the second – comments that seem to connect it to Kitamura. Describing the delicate scene that the protagonist does not seem to do well, she explains that she is “different from all that I wrote” before describing her writing in terms which evoke a commonly rated characteristic of Kitamura's writing: “All that I write is based on the excavation of the smallest emotions, living in the corner and the co-en -crarage of a meeting”. Curiously, the protagonist interprets these comments as another performance. One cannot help but wonder if Kitamura reflects on his own performance of a characteristic very appreciated by his writing.
Hearing is a flash of a novel. We could read it alongside looking at the horror of the nominated body at the Oscars of Coralie Fargeat The substance or Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller Breakup. All of them suggestively treat performance and self -fractionation and identity. Hearing requires careful and attentive reading, but is also visible from its moment.
Hearing by Katie Kitamura Fern Press 18.99 £ / Riverhead $ 28, 208 pages
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