2016-06-01
1 小时 9 分钟Karl Ove Knausgaard joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss V. S. Naipaul's “Jack's Garden,” from a 1986 issue of the magazine.
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 part of a story by V.
S.
Naipaul, Jack's Garden, which was published in the New Yorker in October of 1986.
If I say it was winter when I arrived at that house in the river valley, it is because I remember the mist, the four days of rain and mist that hid my surroundings from me and answered my anxiety at the time, anxiety about my work and this move to a new place.
The story was chosen by Karlovy Knausgaard, the author of the six volume autobiographical novel my Struggle, which was published in Norway from 2009 to 2011.
Excerpts from books two, three, four and five of my struggle have appeared in the magazine or on newyorker.com dot hi, Carlaby.
Hi.
So what you've chosen to read today is the beginning of Jack's Garden by versus Naipaul, which was published in the magazine in 1986 and then became, in a slightly different form, the beginning of his novel the Enigma of Arrival.
Yeah.
When did you first read it?
I read it early nineties.
I was very young in my early twenties, and I was working night shifts, and I started to read that book, the Enigma of arrival, and it made such an impression on me, and it was so boring because it is, because there really is nothing there.
But, you know, it's been on my mind ever since.
And I didn't really understand why the fascination, why it was so fascinating for me.
But I reread it now, and I have done in between, too.
So this is kind of one of my favorite books, and I don't really know why, but there is something in that voice, and it's something in that situation that kind of is.
Yeah, there's a strong pull in it for me.