2012-12-04
39 分钟Hisham Matar reads "Shakespeare's Memory," by Jorge Luis Borges.
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 Shakespeare's memory by Jorge Luis Borges.
I would possess Shakespeare and possess him as no one had ever possessed anyone before.
The story was chosen by Hisham Matar, whose first novel in the country of men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006.
His latest novel, Anatomy of a disappearance, was published in 2011.
Hi, Hisham.
Hello, Deborah.
So have you been a lifelong reader of Voorhees?
Has he been an influence on your own work?
I've certainly read him for a long time.
It's very difficult for me to say he's been an influence.
I don't think he has.
But he's been an influence on my thinking about literature because I think he has such a complex and intricate and agile intellect.
But actually I think he has a very simple, simple, in the clear sense temperament.
So he does this wonderful thing that I think has got to be one of the things that literature is about.
It's a kind of thinking.
He thinks through these stories and he doesn't think in the sort of, it's not an argument or hypothesis, but he thinks in that playful, that way that he doesn't really know.
You don't get the sense that he's figured it out and he wants to tell you, but he's exploring what this means and the possibilities of it, and that's just wonderful.