Tag: books

‘Audition’ – I Can’t Take it Anymore – A family dystopia

SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Heidhues 6.1.2025

I finished Katie Kitamura’s ‘Audition’. It certainly is a dark story. I am still trying to make sense of it. I can only conclude the unnamed narrator decides at the conclusion of this short 197 page story, “I can’t take it anymore.”

Particularly since the plot line has two distinctive threads. In the first half of the story the narrator, an accomplished stage and screen actress, establishes a relationship with a young man, Xavier. He claims to be the narrator’s son. He most definitely is not as the story unspools.

In the story’s second half Xavier is indeed the narrator’s son in a quick and jarring juxtaposition in the story line. He returns home to live with his mom, the narrator, and his father, Tomas. The entire relationship inevitably collapses. I must read ‘Audition’ a second time. It’s not so much that the story is difficult to follow, particularly in the second half.

What’s challenging is the relationship with her son Xavier, the narrator is dissecting. Why would the narrator know Xavier is not her son in the first half of the story. When in the second half, Xavier is portrayed as the son and proceeds to destroy the entire family relationship.

Xavier’s father Tomas is an integral part of this mind bending story. Initially Tomas is the strong, elusive, silent parent who welcomes Xavier home. But when Xavier precipitates the ruination of the family unit the father Tomas is a willing collaborator. He is both psychologically and physically battered in the end.

Part of which has to do with the eerie demonic Hana who moves into the New York City apartment with Xavier and his parents. The narrator has a very frosty relationship with Hana from the outset. While Tomas is obviously smitten in a way which leads to a very perverse denouement.

This is the kind of dark story which would benefit by Katie Kitamura concluding the novel with an essay about the thought process which went into the creation of this novel. The development of the plot and characters.

Katie Kitamura’s novels, and I have read several, are different in the sense the protagonist is never named. There are never any quotation marks. The sentence construction is often disjointed which ads to the fascination with her writing style. Katie Kitamura’s books are best digested in a quiet contemplative setting, Because the story lines are invariably so deep. ‘Audition’ in particular

The nuts and bolts of ‘Audition’ are straight forward.

It’s the psychological impact which merits a lot of scrutiny. And for the simple literary consumer there’s a lot to digest in ‘Audition’. As there is with the narrator who concludes without saying it, “I can’t take it anymore.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audition_(Kitamura_novel)

The Third Reich of Dreams. Coming to our neighborhood

The Third Reich of Dreams. How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism

SAN FRANCISCO RICHMOND DISTRICT

Lee Heidhues 11.20.2024

After 22 percent of my neighbors (179 allegedly intelligent people) in our precinct voted for Trump I have been thinking hard about what the future will bring on January 20, 2025.

Trump was President in 2019 when I posted a story about “The Third Reich of Dreams: How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism.” Well, terrifyingly here we are again. In America and in my very own neighborhood in a City which likes to think itself “Progressive” and “Tolerant.” I have learned it’s not true.

Street camera for surveillance. Omnipresent in San Francisco 2024

I need not look far. I am surrounded by neighbors with surveillance cameras and high intensity security lights. These insidious tools monitor the comings and goings of everyone and at night pollute the sky. What are these people fearful of in our quiet neighborhood? The families of raccoons who forage in their trash cans?

Perhaps this is why the classic book “The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation” published in 1966 and long out of print is being republished next April.

A warning shot about the dangers of rampant paranoia. Only this time it’s not Nazi Germany. It’s right here on my block.

Excerpted from The New York Review of Books 12.5.2024

Born in 1907 in Forst, Germany, a town near the Polish border, Charlotte Beradt was a young journalist who reported on women’s issues and other aspects of German social and political life for the weekly journal Die Weltbühne.In 1933 Beradt, a committed communist and a Jew, found herself suddenly unemployed. As the Nazi movement grew, she began having nightmares every night.

She wondered whether other people were having similar dreams. She started to ask people about their dreams, discreetly: “I asked the dressmaker, the neighbor, an aunt, a milkman, a friend, almost always without revealing my purpose.” She did this because “dreams like this should be preserved for posterity,” and she wrote down hundreds before fleeing to New York in 1939. There she worked as a hairdresser for fellow émigrés, sometimes spending time with her friend Hannah Arendt.

In 1966 she finally brought her collection together, arranging the dreams by theme, offering her own light commentary, and bolstering each short chapter with epigraphs from the likes of Kafka and Brecht and Arendt herself. She gave the resulting slim volume a memorable title: The Third Reich of Dreams. The book had some modest success but never penetrated the American consciousness like the work of Arendt, perhaps because Beradt offers us not a complex hermeneutics of totalitarianism but rather a quite straightforward picture of the psychological effects of propaganda and manipulation upon a populace.

The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation

by Charlotte Beradt, translated from the German by Damion Searls, with a foreword by Dunya Mikhail

Princeton University Press, 124 pp., $24.95 (to be published in April 2025)