Tessa Hadley Reads Nadine Gordimer

The New Yorker: Fiction

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Yorker, Wnyc, Literature, Books, New, Fiction, Arts

4.6 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2012

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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."

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
0:05.0	I'm Deborah Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.
0:08.0	Each month, we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
0:13.0	This month, we're going to hear City Lovers by Nadine Gordamer.
0:17.0	She sewed swiftly in and out through the four holes of the button with firm, fluent movements of the right hand.
0:24.0	Her gestures supplying an articulacy missing from her talk.
0:29.0	The story was chosen by Tessa Hadley, whose stories have been appearing regularly in the New Yorker for a decade,
0:34.0	and whose readings are frequently featured in the tablet edition of the magazine.
0:38.0	Her most recent novels are The London Train and The Master Bedroom.
0:41.0	Hi, Tessa.
0:42.0	Hi, Deborah.
0:44.0	Nadine Gordamer is going to turn 90 next year, and she's been publishing since the early 1950s.
0:50.0	Have you been a lifelong fan of her work?
0:52.0	Well, I'm sort of too young to be quite a lifelong fan of her life.
0:57.0	For my life.
0:58.0	It was a very important moment when I found her, because I had only really loved old books,
1:06.0	and that seems sort of extraordinary now, but I guess if you do an English literature degree and you read the classics suddenly,
1:14.0	I discovered, actually, through a recommendation, this writer whose books felt as big as Tolstoy to me,
1:21.0	you know, their scale, their kind of moral scope.
1:25.0	But more than that, I learned two things at once.
1:28.0	I learned this new writer, and I learned South Africa about which I knew next to nothing.
1:33.0	I had a few vaguely political write-on ideas, but so these two initiations coming at once,
	...

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