Tessa Hadley Reads Nadine Gordimer

泰莎·哈德利读纳丁·戈迪默

The New Yorker: Fiction

小说

2012-09-06

52 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

In this month's fiction podcast, Tessa Hadley reads "City Lovers," a story by the South African writer and 1991 Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer. The story, which was published in The New Yorker in 1975, focusses on a love affair between a white man and a "colored" woman in Apartheid South Africa. It's deeply political in its details--the man is a geologist at a mining company, the couple's affair is illegal, and they cover it up by pretending that she is his servant. But Gordimer writes with a focussed intimacy that makes the piece a tragic love story rather than a political morality tale. "One of the things I think she can teach us," says Hadley, "is how to write politically without becoming shrill."

单集文稿 ...

  • 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 city lovers by Nadine Gordimer.

  • She sewed swiftly in and out through the four holes of the button with firm, fluent movements of the right hand, her gestures supplying and articulacy missing from her talk.

  • The story was chosen by Tessa Hadley, whose stories have been regularly in the New Yorker for a decade and whose readings are frequently featured in the tablet edition of the magazine.

  • Her most recent novels are the London Train and the Master Bedroom.

  • Hi, Tessa.

  • Hi, Deborah.

  • Nadine Gordimer is going to turn 90 next year, and she's been publishing since the early 1950s.

  • Have you been a lifelong fan of her work?

  • Well, I'm sort of too young to be quite a lifelong fan.

  • Not her life.

  • Your life?

  • Yes.

  • For my love.

  • It was a very important moment when I found her because I had only really loved old books and that seems sort of extraordinary now.

  • But I guess if you do an english literature degree and you read the classics, suddenly I discovered, actually through a recommendation, this writer whose books felt as big as Tolstoy to me, you know, their scale, their kind of moral scope.

  • But more than that, I learned two things at once.

  • I learned this new writer and I learned South Africa, about which I knew next to nothing.