2023-10-02
45 分钟Lucinda Rosenfeld joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Returns,” by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Deborah Treisman, which was published in The New Yorker in 20233. Rosenfeld is the author of five novels, including “I’m So Happy for You” and “Class.”
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month, we're going to hear returns by Annie Arnaud, which was translated from the French by me and appeared in the New Yorker in November of 2022.
I didn't take the taxi that was parked in front of the Railway hotel as I would have anywhere else.
As soon as I'm in sea, I go back to my old ways.
The story was chosen by Lucinda Rosenfeld, who's the author of five novels, including I'm so happy for you and Class.
Hi, Lucinda.
Hi, Deborah.
Nice to see you.
You too.
So how and when did you become a reader of Annie Ernaux's work?
I actually started reading Annie Ernaux a year before she won the Nobel Prize.
A friend put me onto a girl's story, and then I sort of started voraciously consuming all of it.
What made you devour it so voraciously?
There was something startling about the prose.
The language, I'm not the first to remark, is incredibly direct and simple in a kind of shocking way.
I had never seen prose quite that declarative in literary form.
And it was unusual for me to read about the lives of middle class and working class women in a strange way, to realize that you could make literature out of everyday life in some way, whether abortions and punishing mothers and affairs and divorces.
This was the stuff of literature, too.