2022-08-06
51 分钟André Alexis joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Waiting for Death in a Hotel,” by Italo Calvino, translated, from the Italian, by Martin McLaughlin, which was published in The New Yorker in 2006. Alexis’s novels include “Childhood,” “Days by Moonlight,” and “Fifteen Dogs,” which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2015. 2022 © Italo Calvino, performed with permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
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 waiting for death in a hotel by Italo Calvino, which was translated from the Italian by Martin McLoughlin and published in the New Yorker in June of 2006.
This was Michele's funeral procession.
He was a dead man pacing to his own grave along that hallway with its flaking stucco ceiling roses and the faded traces of wall mirrors above the marble mantles.
The story was chosen by Andre Alexis, whose novels include childhood days by moonlight and 15 dogs, which won the Giller Prize in 2015.
Hi, Andre.
Welcome.
How are you, Deborah?
I'm all right.
So can you tell me a bit about your engagement with Calvino's work?
Are you a longtime reader of his?
I am deeply indebted to him in ways that it's going to be difficult for me to kind of squish down and make coherent quickly.
He is really important to me for his love of folklore.
He is also super important to me as a member of the Ulippo, the ouvoir de litteratio potential, which was created in 1961, I think, by Raymond Quinault and Francois Le Lyonnais, which is a group that tried to introduce mathematical ideas into the writing of fiction and that creativity, that way of reading so that you can see both the surface and the depth structure, it was just very influential on how I think about literature.
And do you feel that you use some of his structural techniques in your own work?
Not only do I think that way, but I'm in the midst of using one of his novels, deep structure, to create my own novel.
I'm fascinated by the idea that you can take the deep structure of a story and add your thing to it, and it will change how that structure works and functions.
If you take invisible cities, it has a very rigid mathematical pattern to it, like a sonnet does with its meter and rhyme scheme.