On Katie Kitamura’s “Audition”

In A Separation—Katie Kitamura’s third novel, and the first in an informal trilogy that ends with Audition—the first-person narrator, an unnamed literary translator, is in search of her missing husband Christopher in the southern Peloponnese. One afternoon after her arrival, she hires a driver, Stefano, to show her around and, on their way to a Byzantine church, he informs her of a local conflict between two farmers that has resulted in a months-long wildfire reflected in the barren landscape out the window. When the conversation turns to the purpose of her visit, she falls silent, as she frequently does, burrowing back into her mind where she can consider whether to continue to suppress who she is, and the fact that her marriage had ended long ago.