2015-12-02
55 分钟Andrew O'Hagan joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss Edna O'Brien's "The Widow," from a 1989 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 Edna O'Brien's story the widow, which was published in the New Yorker in 1989.
You may ask, as the Postmistress had asked the postmistress, her sworn enemy, why have venetian blinds drawn at all times, winter and summer, daylight and dark?
What is Bridget trying to hide?
The story was chosen by Andrew O'Hagan, who is the author of five novels, including our fathers, be near me and this year's the illuminations.
His story Foreigners was published in the New Yorker in 2004.
Hi, Andrew.
Hi.
So tell me first, why did you choose a story by Edna O'Brien to read for the podcast?
This is possibly the best story about small town gossip that I've ever encountered.
It has a fantastic sense of specificity about the irish location.
This is set in a very typical irish town, and the closeness of the community in no way denies them.
There are many opportunities for unearthing little horrors about each other, and she animates fantastically well in the story.
This sense of a chorus, almost like a greek chorus we often find in Thomas Hardy's novels or in James Joyce, this sense of a community as a chorus commenting ceaselessly on the lives of others.
And in this story, we see how that can become ruinous.
It's a fantastic distillation of that for me.
Edna O'Brien, she could write about small town scandals like nobody else.
She could also cause them.