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."
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.