• KULT •
By Gian Paolo Serino
a) James Ellroy wrote that your novel is "the ultimate metaphorical tale of [...] psychic loss and grip, friendship and alienation". Don't you think these are synonyms, in the end?
They probably are, but you must remember blurbs are intended for a reader unfamiliar with both the writer and their book. It is the cheese in the mousetrap, so to speak. When I write blurbs for other authors' books I think what words would catch and hold me in a bookstore if I were to pick up an unfamiliar book and give it a look for thirty seconds, especially if I am unfamiliar with this writer's work? Sometimes the cheese in the trap is smelly, sometimes it is the best brie. That is for you the potential buyer to decide, isn't it?
b) In a passage of the book you write "Live every day like your hair is on fire..."
Someone once asked an expert in reincarnation, "if there is such a thing as reincarnation, why don't we remember our past lives?" The expert said something I have never forgotten-- "What did you have for lunch two days ago?" Then he paused and smiled. "If you can't remember what you ate forty hours ago, how are you supposed to remember what happened to you sixty or a hundred years ago?" I think one of the great sins and sadnesses of our lives is we live and pay attention to what we do at such low "volume" that we forget from one minute to the next what we did and why. To me, that is why so many old people are bitter-- because they can't literally remember their lives and now that they're almost finished, they bitterly resent and regret that. if you were to live every day 'as if your hair was on fire,' figuratively, when you are old and tired I honestly believe there would be a lot more to remember and hopefully make you satisfied that you had a life well lived.
c) In your book you often write about death and illness. Don't you think that interest in death and illness is always just another expression of interest in life?
Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head, as we say in America. I just finished a book tour in another country for my latest novel and one of the questions that was continually asked was why do I write so much about death in my books? I said I do not write about death-- it is just a metaphor 3/4 of the time. I use it to write about life and how we should live it moment to moment so as to "defeat" Death. In FROM THE TEETH OF ANGELS, one of the characters literally confronts Death at some point and says something along the lines "because we are human, we are always conscious of you. But if we live our lives right and well, much of the time we are able to forget death because there is no time or place to think about it-- we are simply too busy. When a human being forgets about death because their life is so full and rich, then you Death, always lose. Always." That is one of the major points of this book and I am delighted to see how you noticed it. Thank you.
d) How come, according to you, we tend to avoid these issues? We exorcise them with extra-violent movies and books but we always forget that every moment can be the last...
People like to play safe with Death. They bungee jump so long as the chord is thick and has been safety checked ten times. They watch ultra violent horror films like HOSTEL because they know after two hours the lights come back on and the "bogeymen" go back to being film creatures. I suppose in a way it is an attempt to exorcise or inure our fear of death-- by facing it in a safe way (bungee jumping) we think we are overcoming it. But look at the face of a person who is terminally ill with cancer or AIDS and it is definitely not the same face as a person who has just come out of a gruesome horror film. For the sick person, the horror doesn't go away when the lights come on. That might be the greatest horror of all-- for them, not only does it not go away, it gets worse. That's one of the reasons why I find it particularly repellent to see Goths, punks, Death Metal bands and their fans... etcetera, glorifying death. If they're so in love with it, why don't they volunteer at a hospice with real dying people, or work in the refugee camps of Darfur, rather than romanticizing it in a false/middle class/safe but ultimately dishonest way? Real death is not a romantic figure. In Christopher Marlowe's and Goethe's plays Faustus, Death is a romantic seductive character only until you have signed your soul away to him. Once that happens, Death becomes a very scary, unrelenting villain. Your worst enemy forever.
e) Why, unlike your previous books, you choose to write this story as if it was an oral tale?
It was a challenge to see if I could tell one story from several points of view, all of them different- a man and two women. Sometimes it is good to go in different directions with a narrative voice because it shows you qualities of human characters you would not have normally seen if you chose to tell your story with one single voice only.