2019-01-03
55 分钟Orhan Pamuk joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss "Ibn Hakkan Al-Bokhari, Dead in his Labyrinth," by Jorge Luis Borges, from a 1970 issue of the magazine. Pamuk's novels include "Snow," "My Name is Red," and "The Museum of Innocence." He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.
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 Ibn Hakan al Bokhari dead in his labyrinth by Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas D.
Giovanni.
In collaboration with the authorization, it was published in the New Yorker in April of 1970.
Wary of a world that lacked the dignity of danger, the two friends set great value on these far reaches of Cornwall.
The story was chosen by Orhan Pamuk, who is the author of ten novels, including the Red Haired Woman and the Museum of Innocence.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006.
Hi, Orhan.
Hi, Deborah.
So the last time you were on this podcast, you read a piece by Vladimir Nabokov, and this time you were quite sure that you wanted to read Borges.
So I'm wondering what Borges has meant for you in your reading and writing.
Let me put it this way.
The greatest novelists are Tostoy, Dostoevsky, Proust and Thomas Mann.
Then the Calvino, the Borges and Nobako comes for me.
The greats were the great masters of 19th century fiction.
Great composers of big, moving, deep novels, especially Borges and Calvino, deconstructed what they achieved.
I like it when sometimes Borges says, well, Henry James would write 700 pages of a novel about this.
Let me tell you this in a brief story, and this is why one is attracted by Borges.