Deborah Treisman
speaker
982 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 1 Sep
Deborah Treisman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And then we get this narration of his former life, you know, walking along the river with the cherry blossoms and his son and his wife and so on, which feels very organic.
And yet even there, he plants something, which is it's like walking along the Moldau River.
Now, why the Moldau River, which runs through Prague?
Clearly, knowing Murakami's preoccupations, I assume this is because Kafka used to walk along the Moldau River.
And from there, see the castle, which is a subject of one of the greatest frustrations in literature.
Someone cannot get to where he needs to go.
So even in that kind of idyllic picture of a happy marriage, we get the ultimate sensation of being blocked somehow.
I was thinking about Kafka and Murakami and Borges and this sort of strain that they all have in their work, which is this repeated desire to kind of create puzzles, conundrums, things that don't make sense, and then their ability to leave them unsolved, you know, and to suggest to the reader, perhaps you can find a solution, perhaps you can't, but I'm not going to solve it for you, which...
You know, it's quite hard to do, actually.
Yes, and there's another, for me, Kafka, not reference, but element here in this narrator, which is this repeated sense that he's not in the right body, that he's in plaster that might flake off.
To me, it gives the sense of this kind of insect in a cocoon about to shed this cocoon and emerge as something different or perhaps as a cockroach.
And I just think that it's a through line between the two of them, that there is this sense of being in one's body and not being in one's body that is very present.
Yeah, yeah.
Except we can imagine it's someone else's rupture that we're becoming involved in.
The rupture itself in this story, it's very interesting how he describes the relationship between the narrator and Izumi, because...
He even says it's not really love.
You can't call it love.
It was total empathy.
They have this complete understanding.
It's not passionate.
Showing 341–360 of 982 · page 18 of 50
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