2023-05-02
56 分钟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 a slice of life by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the 1925 russian text by Dmitri Nabokov, in collaboration with the authorization, which was published in the New Yorker in April of 1976.
For the first time, he sat on my couch and shed cigarette ashes on my polychrome cushions.
Yet the event which would once have given me divine pleasure now did not gladden me one bit.
The story was chosen by Yunus Hassan Kimiri, a swedish fiction writer and playwright whose novels include the family clause and everything.
I don't remember.
Hi, Jonas.
Welcome.
Thank you.
So can you tell me what your first connection with Nabokov was, as he had a big influence on you?
I discovered him when I was in my early twenties.
For a long time, I had been writing with a kind of shame because I enjoyed it so much.
I just understood that as a writer, you kind of should not love it, or you should focus a lot on how hard it is and how difficult it is.
And, of course, it's tricky to write beautiful sentences.
Of course it's tricky to kind of create a nuanced character.
But when I discovered Nabokov, what I felt was that there was a certain kind of joy in the sentence making that I could relate to.
It just felt like he had a blast.
And I was really infatuated by that joy, I think I was.