• interview •
by Bill Babouris
B. Babouris: You obviously love the story-within-a-story motif. Is this something you try to achieve or does it come out naturally? Since writers develop a faculty which looks at common, everyday scenes and asks "what if?", would I be right in presuming that you had actually witnessed that man who suffered from acute Parkinson's disease drink his coffee with a straw? ("Sleeping in Flame")
J. Carroll: First of all, I'm one of those writers who starts with the first sentence and that's all. There are friends of mine who know the whole thing before they begin; I'm not one of those. So, essentially, the book &emdash;or the story, or whatever it is that I'm doing&emdash; evolves organically. I tend to be very lenient about things that want to come into the story... I mean, one of the questions that you ask here is about the man with the straw and, yes, it's a real story; basically, I just made a note of that when I saw it that day because I knew I would want to use it in something I wrote.
B. Babouris: Do you have a small notebook or something always with you?
J. Carroll: I always carry a notebook with me. If I see an interesting sign or a scene or something, I just jot down and talk to myself. And then some weeks later I'll just go back and look at it and see if that stuff's interesting, and if it is I end up using it.
Bill Babouris: In at least four of your books ("Black Cocktail", "Sleeping in Flame", "After Silence" and "Bones of the Moon") you explore the concept of "other lives", but each time the basic idea is different. In "Black Cocktail" the hero had to find the other five incarnations of his soul to be complete. In "After Silence" Max Fischer &emdash;believes he&emdash; is also his son, etc. I was wondering if you believe in reincarnation. Do you subscribe to any of the major religion's?
J. Carroll: Other lives... I don't know what comes after we die. I have a feeling... it seems to me that there is something. People keep asking, particularly after reading "From the Teeth of Angels", if I believe in the [pauses] Big Stuff. I do. I do believe there is a God, I do believe there is an afterlife, I just have no idea what it is. I suppose my philosophy is best summed up in "From the Teeth of Angels", and it's basically what [Arlen Ford] says to Death at some point, that if we can live as fully as possible then we won't think much about death, and that's what matters. Maybe what life works down to is to try and live it as fully as possible so that death is really not much in your mind.
I can play with reincarnation and I can play with the afterlife and all this stuff, but essentially the fantastical stuff that I use in my books usually is there to address a certain question that is for me in my everyday. How can I live a better life? Is there such a thing as an overall morality in all this? The fact that it takes place within a context in which there may be fantasy or even what some people call "horror" is simply the venue by which I'm addressing the question.
B. Babouris: So, is it basically a reworking of the same idea in each of these books?
J. Carroll: I don't think so. As you grow older your attitude and your philosophy changes. The book that you're publishing, "A Child Across the Sky", came about because I had spent a lot of time reading about [Goethe's] "Faust", [which asked questions such as] "can art come alive?", and "should we sell-out for our own needs?", etc, etc. I feel, in certain ways, distant from all this now, because that kind of thinking is nice if you have time and you're at leisure, but the more concrete stuff, which is "how do I live my everyday?", is more at the forefront to me at this point. So, do I feel the same way now that I did about some things in "A Child Across the Sky"? No. I do, about certain other things, but I feel that you write about what bites you, and what bites you is the question of how you're living, and where, and how old you are, etc. My first books, like "The Land of Laughs" or "Voice of Our Shadow" for example, are very, very far away from me now. They are like children you know; I don't love them best, but I've loved them the longest. But as far as feeling the same way that I did when I wrote them, not at all.
B. Babouris: Are you carrying the same ideas though?
J. Carroll: I think you carry certain motifs. I'm always playing with the idea of creation, whether it be artistic creation or human creation, a father image which often comes through, romantic triangles, people involved with too many people and what the repercussions, etc. But it does evolve.
B. Babouris: Well, change is proof of existence, isn't it?
J. Carroll: Exactly.
B. Babouris: You do come from a multi-religious background, is that right?
J. Carroll: Yeah, I do. My father was a Jew and my mother was an American Christian Scientist, and what evolved out of this is that one of my brothers became a Sufi, one became an Orthodox Jew, one was a Christian Scientist; there was this vegetable soup of religion. We were told to go to church until we were about 12 and then it was up to us and, essentially, what I think happened is that everyone in the family evolved at a different direction. I suppose I'm the most agnostic of all, but it was a good thing because there was such diversion that the Christian attitude had the opportunity to evolve at different directions, rather than in a "You will be Catholic" or "You will be Jewish" way.
B. Babouris: Looking back, one could say that book by book you developed a more subtle approach. The fantastical/magical element is not as overt and strong in "After Silence" or "From the Teeth of Angels" as it is in "The Land of Laughs" or "Bones of the Moon" for example. Do you feel that the more overt this element is, the less effective it becomes within the story?
J. Carroll: I don't, because my books come page by page; I don't have any Grand Plan in mind. I literally just finished a new novel that is only realistic because I've been interested in the last couple of years in sexual obsessions and so I decided to write a book that would have something to do with that. The next book that I'll write will go back to being magical. I don't purposely set out to create a "magical book" or a "realistic book".
B. Babouris: But, you do acknowledge this change, don't you?
J. Carroll: I have an idea, after the first 20-30 pages which direction the book go in, but before that I don't. And I also don't know what's going to happen in them. When I was writing "After Silence", after I had the idea of her having kidnapped the child, I knew there was no way there could be any magic in this book; it just had to be a &emdash;what I'd call a&emdash; thriller.
The first chapter of "From the Teeth of Angels" was a short story and it was the first time that I had ever been so interested in my characters in a short story that I wanted to see what happened to them, so I just took it further and further. But it's never purposeful, like "this time I'm going to do magic" or "this time I'm going to do reality". It comes out on its own.
B. Babouris: You rarely go for a happy ending. Most of the times the ending is tricky or clearly ominous. Why is that? Do you feel that most writers' preference for happy endings is market-dictated?
J. Carroll: I've had troubles with the market throughout all my career. I don't purposefully set out to have a happy or a sad ending, it just seems organic, it comes about, you know, how it has to end up. The trouble that I've had &emdash;although it's gone away now, my books are selling extremely well in places where they didn't before&emdash; is that publishers were asking "is it realistic?", "is it psychological?", "is it horror?", "is it fantasy?", "is it science-fiction?", etc, and whenever I would talk to them I'd say "Just put them on the fiction self and let the reader decide these things."
B. Babouris: There are times, however, when the reader wants this kind of labeling, isn't it so?
J. Carroll: I understand that; I'll tell you a story. Do you know the publisher Suhrkamp in Germany? Suhrkamp is the big one, that's the prestigious big one. They have a label called "The Fantastic Bibliotheque" which literally has either pink or mauve covers on, and great people like Borges or Stanislav Lem have been published under this label. Lem calls it the "Pink Ghetto" and I think it's absolutely true. Yes, you do have devoted science-fiction, fantasy or horror readers, but unfortunately too many people say: "Oh, it's science-fiction; I'm not interested." Borges' first stories were published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Lem in America was simply a science-fiction writer until they put him on the front page of The New York Times. I don't know if it's the same in Greece, but it's almost as if there has to be some sort of cement breaker to get you through, a "he's ok; even though you think it's science-fiction, it's more than that" thing.
B. Babouris: It, more or less, is the same in the Greek market as well.
J. Carroll: This really bugs me because, basically, my work has been labeled "magical realism", in Germany they call it "hyper-fiction" (if you look up the word "hyper" in an English dictionary, one of the definitions you'll find is: "Reality taking place beyond three dimensions".) Everybody's looking for labels but unfortunately that can really cut you at hand because there are those who are really interested in that label and those who don't want to have anything to do with it; and I think that that's very dangerous.
I've been walking around and whistling my own tune for a long time. Luckily, sometimes you create for an audience that isn't there yet. Interestingly enough, in the last three years there's been an astonishing movement all over the world, literally, of people buying my stuff; in Poland it's number one, In Japan it sells millions of copies. Why? Simply because people are, I think, more open now into this kind of non-genre thing and they are accepting it. Although I must say that in my own case, my own career, the people who kept my early works alive were the science-fiction, horror and fantasy readers; they were the ones who had the paperback copy and handed it around to their friends. I'm always grateful to them for that.
B. Babouris: So, in a sense, you're writing solely for yourself, not writing to be read by others.
J. Carroll: You write about what bites you. Stephen King is a really good friend of mine and we talk about this stuff a lot. I honestly think that King writes exactly the kind of stories that he wants to. He says you write the stories that are in your heart and I don't think that he's a sell-out in that context. Whereas there are other people who are very obviously and very cynically writing the kind of books they think will sell, and in the end it's like rock 'n' roll music, where one group sounds exactly like the other but in the end it's that one band that writes from the heart that sooner or later people will be talking about.
B. Babouris: I'm surprised you've never been labeled "slipstream".
J. Carroll: I don't know the phrase.
B. Babouris: "Slipstream" is fiction that although it's not science-fiction, most science-fiction readers like to read it.
J. Carroll: No, I've never been called that. [laughs]
As I said before, my exposure to science-fiction, fantasy and horror readers has always been very positive; I love them because they're probably the most devoted readers of all and also they're the most zealous; you know what I mean, they'll go to their friends and say: "You MUST read this book." They kept people like Philip K. Dick alive, or even Burroughs to a certain extend, when other people wouldn't touch their books with a ten-foot stick. So, in that context, I think they're probably the greatest readers in the world to have because they'll keep you going. But they are limited; you can say that they help you sell millions of copies but I want the 15 year-old kid on Skiathos to read my book and if that kid sees one of my books with a pink cover [in the Pink Ghetto series] he's not going to read it and that I don't like. He can read my book and hate it and never want to read another one, but I want to be given that chance; very often if you say "it's science-fiction" or "it's horror", people go away.
B. Babouris: You seem to have developed a pool of characters from which you draw the suitable ones for each new book. The main character of book A crops up in book B or C as a background character, etc. and most of them know one another. Are these characters based on people you know? Why have you opted for this "mythology"? To what extent are your books autobiographical?
J. Carroll: I set out to do a series of six books, starting with "Bones of the Moon" and finishing with "From the Teeth of Angels", and literally the last word of the last book is "Amen." What I wanted to do is to create a world much like one of my writing heroes, the Canadian writer Robert Davis, so that each books stands alone but if you read, for example, "A Child Across the Sky" and you're interested in Weber Gregston and want to know who this guy is and what's his background you can go to one of the other books, which hopefully stand up individually as well. In effect it's much like a photo album; [in this book] the character is young, [in this book] he's old, etc.
I've been accused at times of being snob in what I write about because I write about writers, actors, directors, etc. &emdash; that's what I know; I write films and I write books and I live in Europe &emdash; I don't make McDonalds hamburgers. Basically I write about what I know. Are my characters literal? No. All of writing is organising your chaos.
B. Babouris: Combining elements from here and there.
J. Carroll: Absolutely. And so, is there an absolute Weber Gregston? No. But he's a little bit of a person I'd like to create, a little bit of so and so...
I think it's quite dangerous to say that my books are, for example, 30% or 90% autobiographical. I think there are very few writers who don't use their own life as their launching pad, whatever kind of books it is that they're writing.
B. Babouris: There is also the argument that suggests that you have to write about your life in order to become a good writer.
J. Carroll: I would have to agree with that. There's this funny example of a character in "Outside the Dog Museum", Claire Stansfield. She is a very plain-looking but interesting woman. The woman who I based her on is an extraordinarily beautiful but not particularly interesting woman; and I just flipped-flopped it; and in that sense, that's how I usually do these things.
B. Babouris: When we spoke on the phone for the first time you sounded genuinely shocked by the fact that "A Child Across the Sky" would be part of a horror series. Is it just the labeling that bothers you or do you feel that your books don't belong in the horror genre? Although you don't really write mainstream horror, your books usually contain some strong horrific scenes. What do you dislike most in modern horror?
J. Carroll: What I dislike most in modern horror is that it has no imagination, it's hitting the same chords all the time (sexual torment, the creature beneath the bed, etc.)
I think probably the greatest horror novel of our time is either "Silence of the Lambs" or "Red Dragon" by Thomas Harris; but they were not meant to be horror novels. Than Hannibal Lecter stuff, I find that to be truly scary; but when some two-headed creature comes out of the tomb I yawn.
B. Babouris: Wouldn't that be supernatural horror?
J. Carroll: Yes... but when you're talking about psychological horror then you're getting closer and closer to "mainstream" stuff, unless there's lots of gore and blood, etc. This is why I say to me Harris is a great horror novelist, although he's not a horror novelist, anymore than Ruskalnikof??? putting an axe into the old woman's head is a horror novel.
Horror worries me because as soon as the word is said it seems to have certain things that need to go along with it. First of all the book has to be 600 pages or more and in many cases these people are dreadful writers, they shouldn't be writing 600 pages; and it's both their fault and their editor's fault because these things should be cut &emdash; but again it goes back to market demand. Here's an example: an editor in England once offered me an enormous amount of money, an obscene amount of money to write a horror novel and when I asked her: "what are the requirements?", she said: "it has to be at least 600 pages" and I refused. I told her I can't write a 600-page novel, much less a 600-page horror novel, but she said: "Well, that's what sells". She was very honest about it and I respected her for saying that, but when you're doing that...
B. Babouris: it's suddenly quantity, not quality, that matters.
J. Carroll: Exactly. I don't know if you have this in Greece but in America we have these period romance books that are sold in the supermarkets and they have to be 600 pages long! And on top of that, they are really, really badly written, partly because there's no editing.
B. Babouris: At least here they're shorter!
J. Carroll: Yes! [laughs] I mean, Barbara Cartland is ok, she's famous for writing these romance novels, but her books are only 199 pages long. Obviously there are people who want to read 600 pages because with other writers &emdash;I'm told&emdash; the requirements for this kind of money are "you have to have so many pages and so many monsters, etc." It reminded me in a certain way of when I was working in Hollywood as a screenwriter, when the producers would say: "There has to be an explosion every nine pages" and they were absolutely serious and not being cynical; they'd done all these psychological studies and came to the conclusion that the audience needs to be stimulated every nine minutes; but that to me isn't good writing.
B. Babouris: Well, it is a different kind of writing, anyway, in the sense that in Hollywood you're writing for the money.
J. Carroll: When I went to Hollywood I had a kind of a strange experience because I made a lot of money but nothing I did was actually made into a film; they would say to me: "Oh, we love this, go do that" and I'd literally do that but when I'd come back with it they'd say: "Well, actually this is too weird, what we really want is the 'When Harry Met Sally' of the 90s'". "But that's what you hired me to do!" I'd reply and they'd go: "Well, yeah, we thought about it and what you're doing is too dangerous, too risky".
B. Babouris: It's basically a matter of choice too; I mean, if you decide to go for it, that's ok, but for the time being you seem satisfied writing about "things that bite" you, as you said.
J. Carroll: The people I know, with the exception of [Stephen] King who seems very content with what he's doing, who are very successful on a commercial level &emdash;supposedly the critics aren't very happy with what they do&emdash; are extremely paranoid. They'll say: "Well, Charles Dickens was popular too," and I'm always very wary when a person gets paranoid about what they're doing. I think it's fine if you write for money, it's not selling-out or prostitution or whatever, if that's what you want then go for it, but when people get very defensive and paranoid they don't really sound like happy campers to me. I've had a lot of exposure to this, both in novelists and screenwriters &emdash; I mean, I loved "Die Hard", I'd be really happy to write a "Die Hard" film, but if you talk to the writers of "Die Hard" you'll find they're very defensive, and in that sense something is not right.
B. Babouris: Sticking with this question about horror, how do you feel about the Bram Stoker award you received for "The Panic Hand"? It is a horror literature award, isn't it?
J. Carroll: We all love awards and I'm grateful again to the readership who's stuck with me; I guess it's this readership that the Bram Stoker award or the World Fantasy award gets voted on by people in the know> I'm always grateful for awards. As far as the writers of horror are concerned, some of them are better than others while some are absolutely dreadful writers. There's people like Graham Joyce who's a terrific writer&emdash;
B. Babouris: We'll be publishing "The Tooth Fairy" in Greek. He's just been nominated for the Booker prize.
J. Carroll: Graham Joyce was?! Good for him! [obviously approving] For which one?
B. Babouris: For "The Tooth Fairy", his latest novel.
J. Carroll: Wow, isn't that good? I'm really happy for him, he's a really good writer. And then you have someone like... Guy N. Smith, who writes "maggot books". But good writers are good writers, and in that context if a good horror writer nominates me for what I'm doing I'm touched; if Guy N. Smith does, well, then I'm less touched. Apparently, from what someone told me who was at the Stoker, people were &emdash;let me remember the diplomatic phrase he used&emdash; pleasantly pleased that I had won it. I think the people in both horror and science-fiction have always watched me warily. I read an article by this science-fiction writer, Mark Laidlaw, about who's hot and who's not in the field; he wrote about me but very cautiously, he said: "The trouble with Carroll is that he's really regarded in mainstream fiction circles and critics love him, " as if that gives me a mark on my face. Genre writers want to be taken seriously, but when one of theirs is taken seriously...
B. Babouris: ...the rest become reluctant to acknowledge it.
J. Carroll: Right.
B. Babouris: I am curious about the writing process that you follow. Do you just get a skeleton plan of the story down on paper and improvise as you go along or do you prefer to let the story mature in your mind for a few months and reach a point where it needs to tell itself? Do you think that a thorough pre-plotting works in favor of the novel eventually? Looking back, where do you think your best ideas came from?
J. Carroll: I think I've already answered most of this question. I usually come up with a title before I start a book and then, when I find the first sentence, I can begin the book; and that's almost always been the process. When I wrote "A Child Across the Sky" I remember laughing, I was walking the dog one day and I was sort of day-dreaming when suddenly I thought of the opening phrase, and then I started laughing because: 1) I just loved that sentence and 2) I knew I could begin a new book.
B. Babouris: Well, it is an excellent opening phrase.
J. Carroll: For years I try to do that, so a lot of my books have a catchy first line, and then I got really angry because one critic wrote: "Well, here's a typical Carroll book; it has a great first line, there are talking dogs and flying children."
B. Babouris: [laughs]
J. Carroll: That infuriated me, so I immediately turned around and wrote "After Silence". But in that context, and I'm talking literally, if I have a title and then I get a first line then I can write a book. I think that writing is very close to visiting a foreign land I know nothing about, you know, it's all new smells, new this, new that; I know my house, I don't need to travel around my house. Being a tourist in a foreign land means that my eyes are open and I'm ready for wonder, and that's extremely important to me.
B. Babouris: I was wondering where did the inspiration for Venasque came from. I mean, to me he sounds like a take on the whole New Age thing.
J. Carroll: Some people have called my stuff "new-agey" and I get very angry when I hear that. Where Venasque was based on? I once met a very famous and very holy Sufi teacher who struck me in the most marvelous ways because of how down to earth he was and what a wonderful sense of humour he had. This person was so famous and so renowned among the Sufi people that it was kind of spooky meeting him, but he was so great and likeable and humourous that he started my mind thinking. Venasque is not new-age, in the sense that he does have that power, he's not some sort of "channeler" talking to the spirits of 10.000 year-old warriors. When someone comes to him, Venasque does help them in the most extraordinary ways. But to me, the thing about Venasque is the fact of how wise he is, and I say that quite innocently because he is the only character I have created who I literally did not know what he was going to say; often he would say something and I'd go: "Wow, where did that come from?" It's almost like it was automatic writing with Venasque.
The name Venasque comes from a small hill-town in the south of France where I spent some time and was very happy. Essentially, I wanted to create a person who made others as content as that place made me.
Unfortunately, New Age is also a kind of ghetto, in the sense that there's some really wonderful stuff coming out of it, powerful and balanced stuff, but at the same time there are a lot of cheesy, opportunistic people playing on it and that's the stuff that gets out and ruins the whole thing.
B. Babouris: More or less it's dead as a movement now.
J. Carroll: I don't know. I'm really not tuned in to it. You know what bothers me with it? Why does Deepak Chopra live in a 10 million dollar house? This is a little disturbing. And then someone goes: "Well, he made a book on how to spiritually make a lot of money". But that doesn't go, it just doesn't go. Whereas other people have some very balanced things to say, things that make a lot of sense.
B. Babouris: But as a character, Venasque struck me as a debunking of the typical new-age guru.
J. Carroll: Absolutely. Absolutely. Venasque doesn't care, you know what I mean? He spends his life making sandwiches; and then it got out he has those funny animals, and then it got out that he has those strange abilities and people started coming to him. I think Venasque is originally introduced in a radio interview with Ingram York [another character from the pool of characters mentioned above] and when York says to him: "Is it true you can make people fly?" he goes: "Sure, sure, so what? It's no big deal!" Whereas these [new-age gurus] will say: "I will have you walk on hot coals by the end of your teachings for me". What am I going to do walking on coals? What do I need it for? As Venasque would say, flying isn't exactly going to do you any good, but you learn from flying and that to me is very powerful.
B. Babouris: Can you please describe a typical J. Carroll day during your writing periods? How many hours do you work per day? Do you prefer day or night? Continuously or with breaks? Do you use a computer or are you a typewriter person?
J. Carroll: I like to write, so I write a lot. I wrote my ten books in thirteen years along with a bunch of films for which I don't take credit for.
B. Babouris: Was this your own choice?
J. Carroll: One of the things about Hollywood that I don't like is that there are always people fighting about who wrote this film and that film, the fight to take credit. The Writer's Guild will say that if 30% of a script is yours you'll take credit. As far as I 'm concerned, if the work is yours then you should take credit for it; the fact that somebody played with it, pushed it around and edited some sentences here and there doesn't mean they wrote it; you wrote it. So, in that context, I did a bit of script-doctoring over the past years and for most of that I didn't take credit, because it was not my work. I have a film out here which is a terrible, terrible film. The writer/director came to me and said: "Please help me; re-write this script". So, I re-wrote it, he read and threw it out and went back to his original own and shot this dreadful film. I didn't do anything on that script [laughs]; I mean, I gave him something which he didn't want, he paid me for it and then he went back to his own script &emdash; taking credit for this kind of thing wouldn't be proper.
I write a lot. I am a bookwriter who writes movies sometimes but I spent almost three years writing films in California and I wanted to get that out of my system. This book that I've just finished is the first novel I've written in almost three years.
I get up at 9:00, I pull paperclips [remember "After Silence"?] until I feel I can start writing, I walk the dogs and drink a lot of coffee.
B. Babouris: Are you a quotations collector? (If yes, is this something you started doing specifically for your writing?)
J. Carroll: Sure. I think most writers are quotations collectors. I know very few writers who don't have a notebook and a pen with them when they are sitting and reading a book.
B. Babouris: What's your relationship with animals? There's always a dog or a cat in your novels (my fave is Orlando, the blind cat.) Tell me about your dog.
J. Carroll: I love dogs, I hate cats.
B. Babouris: [laughs] That's quite common, actually. I mean, I know a lot of people who love dogs but hate cats.
J. Carroll: Yeah, or vice-versa.
B. Babouris: Yes.
J. Carroll: Orlando, the blind cat. A friend of mine had a blind cat, so I just used the idea and named the cat Orlando. I have two dogs. I've always had a bull-terrier, I have one for twenty-two years now, and I just recently got a French bulldog.
B. Babouris: What made you move from the States to Austria? Which aspect of living in the USA was the most intolerable for you? And what did you like most about Austria?
J. Carroll: I moved to Austria because I had a job with the American International School. Periodically, I go back to teaching; especially as I become more well known, I find I also become more and more private. One of the things that bother me about "fame" is that people want things from you, often total strangers, and I find myself retreating from that and becoming rather antisocial. Teaching, for me, is the best kind of social experience; I get out from behind my desk and play with the brains of my young students for a while, and that's really good. I never really left teaching, although I stopped for five years.
B. Babouris: Is it English Literature that you're teaching?
J. Carroll: It's Creative Writing. I just started teaching again this year, I'll do it for a couple more. I did it because I had finished the [new] novel and I had the time.
What do I find intolerable about America? Its superficiality. There's too much input but too little input with substance; you know, you go to the movies and they give you a bucket of popcorn as big as the world, you watch the news on television and there's nothing other than American news. It's this kind of superficiality that drives me crazy.
What do I like most about Austria? Its depth, its history, its spookiness to me. Although the Austrians are horrible...no, not the Austrians, the Viennese are horrible people.
B. Babouris: Why do you say that?
J. Carroll: They are notoriously unpleasant, they're tempered, grumpy and officious. When people ask me: "Then why do you live in Vienna?" I oftenly quote that line that others love to say about the Swiss: "How can such a beautiful country belong to such horrible people?" I live in Vienna, I don't live with the Viennese. It allows me the kind of peace and quiet to do the work that's most important to me. And now, now that people know who I am, it allows me to live more privately. When I was in Hollywood people used to call me all the time and most of the times I didn't want to talk to them; people are less likely to call you in Vienna [laughs] than they are in Los Angeles.
B. Babouris: Don't you mind the weather there?
J. Carroll: No, I like it. When I was in Los Angeles, it was too sunny. You live in Greece. In the time that I've spent in Greece only once did I do anything productive, usually what I do is sit in the sun &emdash; which is great if you're vacationing, but not if you're working. I wrote part of my book "The Bones of the Moon" in Greece, on Santorini and Skiathos, and when I did it I would have to go inside, close the doors, pull the shades down, close the windows because I wanted to be outside. Whereas in Vienna the weather is, like, 50% gray.
B. Babouris, Well, it's still sunny here at the moment actually! [The interview was conducted in late October].
J. Carroll: Well, you see what I mean?
B. Babouris: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe your books were more successful in Europe that in the USA. Where would you attribute this to? (I would say that it's partly because your books have a strong European feel to them and their style is quite unconventional.)
J. Carroll: Yes, the books were very successful in Poland, Germany, Italy, in general terms more successful in Europe that in America. But all that is turning around now. For this new book that I will be publishing, which right now is called "Kissing the Beehive", I've got probably the greatest editor in America, this woman named Nan Telese &emdash;she's edited Pat Conroy and Margaret Atwood and all these people. She's a hard, heavy hitter, and so, in this context, Nan took me on because she said that this whole wave of breakthrough and recognition is coming and it has to be done carefully and blah, blah, blah; so in that sense it's been some years coming for this breakthrough to come in my own native land and I think it's partly because of what you say, because my books have a European feel to them and they're also strange.
B. Babouris: And they're not as superficial as your basic mainstream book that does well in the American market.
J. Carroll: I hope not, I hope that you're right. For example, what interested me is that you're choosing to publish "A Child Across the Sky" as the first book of mine to the Greek readers; I think it's an extremely difficult book, some people have accused it of being "cold". Hypothetically speaking, the Americans would not choose to publish it as a first book if it hadn't already been published there, they'd publish one of my, what I call, "softer" books, like "After Silence" or "Sleeping in Flame". My own experience of culture all over Europe is that Europeans are more forgiving and certainly more willing and open to take anything in hand and see if it has value, and in that context you have certain people who have become famous over here whereas in America they wouldn't be famous, and only by being famous over here would they break through in America; for example, Patrick Suskind's "The Perfume" [<To ¢ñùìá>] or Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" [<Ôï _íïìá ôïõ Ñüäïõ>] would've never been a best-seller in America if they hadn't first been over here.
B. Babouris: I read somewhere that you fought for years against having your photograph on your book jackets and that you have the reputation of a recluse; which prompts me to ask: why do you write? Since you don't do it for the publicity, what do you do it for? Money? Satisfaction? Exorcising your inner "demons"?
J. Carroll: I think that I am reclusive because, coming from the American culture where all most people want to do is be on the cover of "People" magazine without having done anything, you can mistake fame for talent. The most famous person in the world is probably Madonna, who's also probably the most untalented person in the world, and yet she's been clever and manipulative enough to be able to get on the cover of "People" magazine. It's like this story, "The Emperor's New Clothes" &emdash; Madonna can't sing and Madonna doesn't write and all she has is this personality, and sooner or later people are going to grow tired of that.
B. Babouris: But at least you can give her credit for being so smart and manipulative.
J. Carroll: Oh, certainly. But I don't think we should mistake her cleverness for talent. People say: "Madonna is a great talent" and this is the "blah-blah" of our age. To me, the great talents are those who whether they're alive or dead their stuff sticks around; there's great quality in what they do. Because I grew up in an environment where there were a lot of famous people around, I saw a lot of neurotic people and I decided that that's not what I want. Fame gets to you. When I go to certain countries to do book tours and they ride you around in limousines and beautiful women send you love notes and everybody's toasting you, you start to become pretty pleased with yourself, and that's a very dangerous thing I believe.
That's why I don't go to these fantasy or horror or science-fiction conventions; everybody wants to buy you a drink and after a while you begin to think: "Wow, I must be doing some pretty good stuff!". I read an interesting thing about Phil Collins the other day. I never knew this, but Phil Collins is much more successful than Madonna and Michael Jackson &emdash;he's one of the richest people in England&emdash; and he said: "People like Madonna or Michael Jackson spend a lot of their money having people around them and kissing their asses. All I want to do is sit around and play music, that's what I like to do. Yeah, I've made all this money but, essentially, I'm doing something that I love rather than something that would get me the limousines." I think that that's a really healthy attitude today.
B. Babouris: So, if you could have your writing without the publicity and all that comes with it, would you go for it?
J. Carroll: Some of it is nice. It's nice to be liked, to be kissed and applauded; in small doses it's a real ego booster, but in large doses it becomes very unhealthy and diminishes whatever it is that you're doing because it does not let you focus on what you're doing.
B. Babouris: Do you like meeting your readers then?
J. Carroll: Yes, very much. I mean, I keep my name in the phone book in Vienna, which other people find horrifying. Certainly there have been some crazies over the years and some have been very scary, but generally I love meeting my readers, I enjoy it, I love signing their books, I love saying to them: "Thank you for paying your $5 and buying this thing. What more wonderful thing could I have?"
I've said this before in interviews, but to me, one of the great joys to being a writer is knowing that a little man is sitting in a taverna on the island of Ios, on a rainy day, reading a book that I wrote seven years ago. That is the most thrilling thing in the world to me.
When I did a tour of Poland last spring, I did a radio talk-show; a woman called-up and said: "I had the gun on the table and I was going to shoot myself but then I read 'A Child Across the Sky' and it convinced me not to." Holy cow! What more could you ask for? In that sense, I love the readers, they're wonderful, and generally speaking my contact with them over all those years has been excellent. Naturally, you get the cuckoos, and the more well known you get, the more cuckoos you attract.
B. Babouris: What your worst horror-story you've ever had with a reader of yours?
J. Carroll: There's this woman reader in Vienna who's absolutely obsessed; she wouldn't go away. I changed my telephone number, I contacted the police, but she just wouldn't stop. Finally, some action had to be taken. You think this stuff happens only in Sharon Stone movies, but that's not the case. I've talked to friends of mine who are great names and all they said was: "Hey man, get used to it!" There are a lot of wackos who feel that because they've read your book, you belong to them or they belong to you or you owe them something or whatever! And all your logical stuff goes right out of the window. Your phone rings, you pick it up, it's them again and you find yourself saying: "Leave me alone! I hate you! Go away!" and they go: "No, no, you don't understand!" [laughs]. That part of the whole thing is not positive at all, but everyone has these horror stories.
B. Babouris: What's your opinion on the translation of literature? I presume that &emdash;inevitably&emdash; most of your books had to be translated into a number of languages (and now into Greek too). Are you happy with the German translation of your books?
J. Carroll: I think it's great that literature gets translated because otherwise we would not have read all those great books.
B. Babouris: I do remember a statement in "Sleeping in Flame" where a character was saying that s/he hates translated literature.
J. Carroll: I have wonderful horror stories about my work being getting translated into different languages and about finding out the mistakes in these translations, but you know what, I was thinking this morning &emdash;knowing that you'd call&emdash; about the Greek writers that I know of and have read, Seferis and Kazantzakis and others, and I would never have these writers in my life if they hadn't been translated. So what if the translations are lousy? At least I had that exposure. Some of my favourite writers in the world are not in my own language so, in that sense, I'm very grateful for their translations because it was through them that I got to see what these writers were telling us.
There are a lot of German translations of my books, because all my books have been translated into German, so far there's been more than seven different translators. From my understanding of German and from what my friends who are native speakers tell me, some of them are very good, some of them so and so, none are very bad. Suhrkamp pride themselves for getting the best translators but I left Suhrkamp for "From the Teeth of Angels" and apparently the person who translated the book for my new publisher is even better, so I'm pretty happy about that.
B. Babouris: Speaking from a translator's point of view, your books are extremely difficult to translate properly, mainly because they are so full of connotations, cultural elements and all sorts of references.
J. Carroll: Yeah, absolutely. For example, one of the entries in your translator's queries that you sent me is "Tobacco Road", which is a 30's novel. How many people will remember that or have actually read it, I don't know.
B. Babouris: There are also huge cultural differences here; half of the elements that enrich your books are known to an American, but in Greece it's a different story altogether... I mean, trust me, it's been a hell of a difficult job translating "A Child Across the Sky" without producing 200 translator's notes in each chapter. Are you open to substituting one element that's not familiar to the reader with another that is?
J. Carroll: Absolutely. The greatest translator of Spanish into English in America translated Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and the story goes that Marquez who I guess can read English went to him and told him: "You made my book even better." I believe a great translator can do that because, basically, I don't know the Greek culture, and what Americans would respond to you might not have it there, but it's important you convey the same image by using something that the Greek readers will respond to.
B. Babouris: Please name (a maximum of) three new writers whose work you respect and explain why.
J. Carroll: I think Graham Joyce is really good. I like this guy, Jonathan [didn't quite catch the name here - Bill]. I knew nothing about him, he wrote to me and asked me to blurb his first novel which turned out to be a really good book, it's a detective story but the detectives in it are animals and interestingly clever. I can't think of anybody else. There are certain mainstream writers that I like very much, but in terms of genre I don't read much genre.
B. Babouris: I was wondering, going back to my first question about the story-within-a-story motif, if you've ever read Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman"?
J. Carroll: The funny thing is Gaiman likes my work a lot and apparently part of "The Sandman" is based on "Bones of the Moon", he dedicated a graphic novel called "A Game of You" to me and I was embarrassed because I don't read illustrated novels, it's just not something that interests me. I met with him, we get along absolutely wonderfully but what he's doing doesn't touch me. I admire the vision he has but I don't really get what the concrete part of it is, you know what I mean?
Dave McKean and John Bolton [both excellent artists] came to me and said to me: "We would like you to do something" and I said: "I'd love to, let's find something that we can work on together". The three of us were going to do something together but the money fell out. Cynically or not, I'm at the point now where I have to write exactly what I fell, what's on my mind. And I have to know the terms. As most people who have had some exposure to this field know, there's a lot of fucking going on &emdash; not the nice fucking, the bad fucking. Essentially, I'd be happy to do an illustrated novel if there was money on the table and a concrete plan of how and when it can be done. I know that John wants to do something and Dave did the covers for five of my books in England, so we're all very close but it's a question of the right project.
B. Babouris: What kind of music do you listen to? I can remember lots of references to classical composers but even names like the Butthole Surfers and Carcass crop up in your books.
J. Carroll: I listen to all kinds of music; I often listen to rock'n'roll when I'm working. I have a 16year old son who keeps me up on what's new and...awful [laughs]
B. Babouris: So, this is where the Carcass mention came from!
J. Carroll: Actually, I knew about Carcass because their lead singer likes my stuff, he sent me some of their work. Do you know Carcass?
B. Babouris: I've briefly met one of their members in England and I've listened to their stuff.
J. Carroll: I forget which album it is, but you open the gatefold sleeve and there's only dead meat.
B. Babouris: The one with the post-mortem photos? It's called "Reek of Putrefaction".
J. Carroll: That's the one that he sent me. I said: "Oooops!". I think Nine Inch Nails are an interesting band, I've mentioned them in some other book. There are those of us who like rock'n'roll and those who feel it's awful, but what transcends all that is the names of the groups; sometimes they are so fabulous that you have to include them &emdash; like, in this new book I have a group called The Evil Superstars and their record is called "Satan's in my Ass" [laughs] and as soon as I heard that I knew I had to use it, although I've never listened to their music.
B. Babouris: You've obviously been to Greece. Which places have you visited? Koukounaries? What do you like most about Greece? What do you like to do whenever you visit a foreign country?
J. Carroll: I love Greece. I haven't been there for much too long. In fact, I haven't been there since I wrote "Bones of the Moon", I wrote the first 50 pages of that book when I was in Greece.
B. Babouris: Where you in Skiathos at that time?
J. Carroll: Yeah, I started in Athens, then I went to Skiathos and then Santorini. The geography of Rondua is based on Santorini, that black sand, that wind blowing all the time. I just haven't been there in years and I'd like to go back because Greece is one of my favourite places in the world. I love the islands. Athens is a bit too much for me, it's just another big city.
B. Babouris: Have you ever been to an island called Anafi?
J. Carroll: No.
B. Babouris: It's just below Santorini, a true writer's paradise. No cars, no newspapers, great beaches, lots of peace and quiet.
J. Carroll: If I could, I'd like to come next summer, it's a question of different projects I'm involved with; I would like to spend some time in Greece just to get life's blood back, you know, to sit in a taverna and drink that strong coffee and look out at the sea &emdash; hopefully that's come across in everything that I've written about Greece. I like the Greek people too, they're tough but they're good-natured, and that combination is rare.
B. Babouris: What are you working on now?
J. Carroll: There's this novel I've just finished, "Kissing the Beehive"&emdash;
B. Babouris: I remember reading somewhere that it's based on a murder case.
J. Carroll: Yes. When I was 12 years old I found the body of a little girl. Actually, I wrote a bit abut it in "A Child Across the Sky", that's the beginning point of it, and I took that story which literally happened and then built a story around it, a 250-page book.
B. Babouris: So when is it coming out?
J. Carroll: I don't know. I literally just handed it and I know that my editor is famous for being a very hard editor, so [laughs] she may be working on it for a while. Luckily in the past &emdash;touch wood&emdash; my books were pretty much finished when I handed them in, I've never had to do any major re-writes, mainly because the writing process takes me so long and because I'm an old English teacher so I've never had any problems with my punctuation.
Are you thinking of publishing any other of my books after "A Child Across the Sky"?
B. Babouris: Yes. It's going to be either "Voice of Our Shadow" or "After Silence". And of course "From the Teeth of Angels".
J. Carroll: There's a good chance that the first two books you mentioned will be filmed. A British film company has bought the rights to "After Silence" and will go into production next fall, from what they tell me. Interestingly enough, I wrote a script for "Voice of Our Shadow" and the producer of +Amadeus+ and +Silence of the Lambs+ saw it and liked it a lot. There's at least a 50% chance that both these books will be made into a film.
I wish you all the luck with your projects and if there's anything else I can do for you just let me know.
B. Babouris: Thank you very much, you've been of great help already.