2021-02-02
1 小时 9 分钟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.
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?