This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, 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 a part of a story by VS Nipal, 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 hit my surroundings from me and answered my anxiety at the time.

An anxiety about my work, and this move to a new place.

The story was chosen by Carl Ovek Nalskart, 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 New Yorker.com.

Hi, Carla Reigh.

Hi.

So what you've chosen to read today is the beginning of Jack's Garden by VS Nipal,

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.

In the 90s, I was very young in my early 20s, and I was working night shifts,

and I started to read that book, The Enigma of Arrival,

...