July 15, 2008
Malamud on your fantasy of yourself
There's a delightful podcast on The New Yorker's Web site this week in which author Aleksandar Hemon reads Bernard Malamud's short story “A Summer's Reading.”
For your convenience, I've included a copy of the audio interview here:
[mp3:http://downloads.newyorker.com/mp3/fiction/080721_fiction_hemon.mp3]
It's an interesting interview because both authors have written about the immigrant experience in America. Hemon apparently has an affinity for Malamud's way of rendering dialogue in the immigrants' mouths.
In case you didn't listen all the way through, here's what Hemon says about Malamud's treatment of immigrants towards the end of the podcast:
I was very happy when I found out that Malamud, who writes about immigrants a lot, he for instance never fakes their accents but rather gives them a particular kind of syntax, which you can recognize as foreign but also … their sentences, their utterings, they sound like poetry to me. It’s a particular kind of music and I really like that. It’s one of my favorite things in Malamud.
“A Summer's Reading” was first published in The New Yorker on September 22, 1956. It was included in the 1997 collection, The Complete Stories.
Hemon's most recent novel is The Lazarus Project. The acclaimed Bosnian-American writer is not Jewish but something about the little-known story of Lazarus Averbuch — a Jew who was murdered by Chicago's chief of police in 1908 — grabbed his attention and became the focus of The Lazarus Project.
As you can tell from the podcast, Hemon's read and thought a lot about Malamud. He says he read The Magic Barrel in one night when he was a teenager in Sarajevo. He also wrote a new introduction for the 2003 publication of Malamud's 1971 novel, The Tenants.
Here's an excerpt in which Hemon describes another reason for why he admires Malamud's writing:
Malamud has all of these soft touches that come out naturally. You would not even think about them twice because he does not show off in his sentences — like some people we know [laughs]. And then suddenly you realize every word has weight.
Find the rest of the podcast on The New Yorker's Web site.
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Hi, you emailed me awhile back about hosting a bookworms carnival. But the email address you gave me keeps bouncing emails back to me. So I’m not sure if you stopped using that address, or if I have a typo in there, or what. But could you please email me again? Thanks!