Katie Kitamura's Reading List

"It’s a novel that uses the narrative form of the psychological thriller, but in the service of exploring a single emotion: jealousy. It’s a simple set up: the unnamed narrator is newly married to the mysterious Maxim de Winter. “The real love story in the novel is between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca” Installed at his estate, Manderlay, she slowly becomes obsessed by his first wife, Rebecca. One reason why the thriller-like aspects of the novel are so successful is because the flattening of narrative goes hand in hand with the flattening of perspective when in the grips of jealousy. She is—she’s terrifying, but she’s also a character who is suffering for love. It seems clear that the real love story in the novel is between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca. Landscape is important, and du Maurier uses it brilliantly—not least because the landscape of Manderlay is one that represents power and the accrual of capital. Among other things, the novel is about class, and how those divisions regulate who is inside and who is outside—and by extension, who wants to serve from inside, and who wants to burn it all down."

"I think this is the first time I’ve thought of The Portrait of a Lady as a story about marriage, but of course it is—it’s a story about the institution of marriage, and the diminished sphere of choice that was available to women at the time. Stories about marriage are clearly not just stories about love—sometimes not even stories about love. Marriage as a social institution, marriage as a form of power—these are at the heart of the story here. Even Isabel Archer’s seduction by Osmond is a narrative that is one of power rather than romance. I first read The Portrait of a Lady when I was in college, and most of my attention went to the first half of the book, when Isabel is defining herself as a young woman. I read it again a decade later, and I was primarily struck by the second half of the book, which is about the disillusionment of Isabel’s character—a disillusionment that also functions as an awakening. But that’s what’s extraordinary about Isabel Archer’s character—that she sees with the force of real clarity, and she carries on. The narrator in Rebecca repeatedly presents herself as ordinary—although I think the power of her narrative indicates that she is more than she admits. I think Isabel Archer is a little different, she is depicted as an exceptional woman ‘confronting her destiny’. I think James is referencing all the narratives of American exceptionalism, of American innocence and American savagery. So she is symbolic in that sense, but I also think she’s an extraordinary character on the page, one of the great female characters in the history of the novel."

"Lust is a novel about rape in marriage, and again is a novel about power relationships within marriage. It tells the story of Gerti, who is trapped in a sexually and psychologically abusive relationship—it’s unflinching and it’s possibly the most relentless of Jelinek’s novels, which is saying quite a lot. I don’t think Jelinek is interested in plot. She’s not even interested in psychology . She does play a lot with fairy tales—she has written a series of works for theatre that are sometimes referred to as the Princess Plays, or the Princess Dramas, and which deconstruct figures like Snow White or Jackie Kennedy. “It’s the darkest version of a fairy tale, more Brothers Grimm than Disney” And I suppose there is a simplicity to the narrative structure, that is fable-like. But it’s the darkest version of a fairy tale, in which daily violence is a key part. It’s more Brothers Grimm than Disney. I think it’s an interesting book because you can sense that she’s trying to locate a language that is not colonized by male experience, and that—even for a writer as brilliant and inventive as Jelinek—this is extremely difficult. You have the sense of echoes and of citation, of language that has been appropriated. Whether or not she feels she succeeded, it truly does not feel like a novel that could have been written by a man, and reading it, you understand how rare that is. It still is; Jelinek is still controversial—even with the Nobel prize, even with all the awards that she has won throughout her career, she remains undomesticated. That’s pretty extraordinary. She’s been recognized and rewarded by the institution [of marriage] but she remains apart from it. I’ve spoken with a few of her translators, and they’ve all commented on the difficulty of translating her prose, because there are so many puns that are specific to the German language. But most interesting to me was something Damion Searls said, which is that one of the most challenging things is preserving the awkwardness of her prose, of maintaining its particularity. I don’t have any German, and can only read in the translation, but to me it feels like her translators have succeeded in this."

"Yes, it has an interesting publication history in English translation—Michael Hofmann identified a part of a much larger work that he chose to translate and advocated publishing as a stand-alone work. Obviously I haven’t read the entire work, so I can’t judge with much authority, but it certainly feels successful as a stand-alone work. I suppose for contemporary readers it might have been a little like reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle . I read it more or less as a straight piece of fiction, in part because I think however much a writer is writing about his or her own life, the process of writing is itself a pretty fierce form of fictionalization. Having said that, the sheer amount of legal detail feels particularly true and particularly lived—to me, the legal proceedings are the most harrowing part of the collapse of the marriage. That’s kind! I read My Marriage in a state of transfixed horror—and returning to your earlier question, it’s hard to deny that the horror is amplified by knowing that it’s autobiographical. It’s a novel that doesn’t really rely on plot, but that sustains tension throughout, primarily through the close observation of the narrator. One thing I was interested in thinking about in writing this book are how we rely on roles and the performance of these roles, in order to maintain the cohesion of our identity—certainly socially, but also personally. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter My narrator doesn’t have recourse to those roles—she’s neither wife nor ex-wife nor widow exactly. That precipitates a kind of crisis. I think one of the most insidious things about the wife in My Marriage is the way she uses the symbolic power of the title ‘wife’ against her husband."

"This is a book that is about many things, but perhaps most successfully it is about a relationship that undergoes multiple shifts of identity over the course of the book. That relationship is observed with a great deal of precision and honesty, and because of circumstance it also reflects the social and cultural moment the book was written in. For me, one of the reasons why the book is so successful is because it feels written from experience, rather than a thesis. It’s as if Nelson is simply writing about her relationship (with artist Harry Dodge) as it unfolded. That relationship doesn’t fit neatly into the categories that existed at the time, and she forcefully critiques the binaries of our society using an array of intellectual and linguistic tools. But that critique is grounded in experience. The stakes of the argument are personal. I don’t think Nelson relied on those binaries to begin with, so the landscape she moves through is not necessarily one of wreck and ruin. It’s one in which certain structures have been cleared to allow her the space to define herself and her relationship as she sees fit. But let’s be honest. Those binaries and prejudices and norms persist—in fact, at this precise moment, they are rapidly regaining power. There’s a wonderful Michael Wood quote, which I’m going to bastardize here—but it’s something like, ‘I’ve read so many books that half of what I think I’ve lived, I’ve merely read in books.’ I think a lot of writers and readers are like that. The investment is real—you see your life through the filter of reading."