Hisham Matar Reads Colm Tóibín

Hisham Matar读了ColmTóibín

The New Yorker: Fiction

小说

2021-02-02

1 小时 9 分钟
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单集简介 ...

Hisham Matar joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “One Minus One,” by Colm Tóibín, which appeared in a 2007 issue of the magazine. Matar’s most recent book, the memoir “A Month in Siena,” came out last year.

单集文稿 ...

  • 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 one minus one by Cullum Tobin, which was published in the New Yorker in May of 2007.

  • I know now, as I walk toward the house I have rented here, that if I called and told you that the bitter past has come back to me tonight in these alien streets with a force that feels like violence, you would say that you are not surprised.

  • You would wonder only why it has taken six years.

  • The story was chosen by Hisham Matar, whose most recent book, a month in Siena, was published last year.

  • Hi, Hisham.

  • Hello, Deborah.

  • So the last time that we were doing this together, we talked about Shakespeare's memory by Borges.

  • One minus one is a very different story, a very different kind of story.

  • What draws you to it?

  • Well, it's a story I love, but it's also, I wanted to choose a story that I had read in the magazine and remember vividly the encounter with it.

  • And it just affected me very, very deeply.

  • And for how simple it is, it is in very subtle ways.

  • It's about such complex things.

  • And I think for that reason, over the years since I first read it, I've occasionally thought back on it and found more and more layers in it.

  • Well, the story's about a man from Ireland living in the US who returns home as his mother is dying.

  • And youve also written in fiction and in nonfiction about exile, about the loss of a parent, about estrangement.

  • Was there something in the subject matter that speaks to you, or is it more in the writing?