Interview with Iuli Tsakalou
Dionysis Marinos, as a narrator, in the infinite transformations he follows justifies the smallest detail each time, believing that everything can be done through this new journey of his. The author talks regarding his book “San Normal” which was recently published by Metaichmio publications.
Reading your book I felt that the heroes have a Dostoyefsian background. What is your need to follow a narrative logic more demanding than traditional form on this journey?
The truth is that while I was writing the book I did not have Dostoyevsky in mind. On the other hand, Fyodor has “marked” the reading and writing mood of all of us so much that, obviously, he will always appear somewhere. Even if it’s inadvertent. I tried to make a “squadron” of heroes, who would all together make up one person in the end. This, following all, might be done on non-traditional terms. I chose the “method” of the spin-off novel, as it allowed me to jump from one story to another and at the end have the freedom to reconstruct and join them all together. Which happens, anyway, in the last chapter of the novel. The road to writing is never easy, but it’s the only one I know. So, no, I’m not afraid of him. On the contrary, I long for him.
How normal can a town called San Normal be?
The title of the novel “plays” with this dichotomy. Typically, San Normal is a town like any other. It might be ours. However, it hides some secrets that, I want to believe, are worth getting to know and “walking” through. Let’s think regarding it another way: how “normal” are the cities we live in? I would answer as much as the people who inhabit them. Therefore, the concept of “normal” is always ambiguous.
Men, women, strange animals, a white lion and a writer who sees his book being written by someone else join their fates. After all, why can’t anyone who enters San Normal come out with anything?
San Normal is a state of mind. A structure that all people make inside themselves. A labyrinth that constitutes our inner life. How many of us have the ability to escape it? And if we do, what will we be left with? I think the most fruitful part of our life is our thoughts. Actions follow and, heck, they’re never done.
You penetrate the most subtle psychological fluctuations of your heroes so that you bring to light traumatic experiences, the management of which will give the right dimensions to the memories and lead to not forgetting. What question do you want the reader to take away?
What interested me from the beginning in writing “San Normal” was, through this strange gallery of heroes, to show the reader that we hide many elements of them inside us. Life, however, is so sweeping that it does not let us or does not allow us to express our true “wants” in a direct and straightforward way. San Normal’s heroes strive for relevance, love and acceptance. Even if they know they won’t find them, they fight until the last moment. Against the odds? Yes, but isn’t that what makes life more interesting? If we had everything easy in front of us, it wouldn’t be worth the journey.
Assuming that a writer’s path is a series of right and wrong steps, how does he discover what he wants in life?
A writer’s journey is every word, every sentence or every story. There is no end to his journey. In essence, he writes and rewrites the same book in a different form. He writes and is written, as Argyris Chionis used to say. I don’t know if, in the end, he discovers what he wants from life. Who can do that, right? Who is he, regardless of his profession, who manages to say with certainty that he found what he really wanted in life? As I said above, life, everyday life leaves such a strong imprint on us that they don’t give us much room to think macroscopically regarding the “plan” or “meaning” of life. Somewhere we lose it, somewhere we find it and in between we struggle to stand on our feet with the least possible losses.
I dwell more in the past Is memory pain or medicine?
It is both, no doubt. Personally I dwell more in the past and less in the present. I guess that way I might never become a Buddhist monk who lives in the present, but I don’t mind. On the other hand, this mnemonic process can cause me various mental upheavals, but in writing it helps me a lot to retrieve rare deposits from the past, which, with the distance of time, I use as primary material for the stories I write. In the end, things I have experienced are transformed, lose their original essence, escape from personal experience and become something wider. An old memory is nothing more than another Proust madeleine. It is the beginning of the thread to start telling a story that is apparently a fabrication, a fiction, but that is precisely the ultimate meaning of art. To show us potential versions that, under other circumstances, would remain unexplained.
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#Dionysis #Marinos #normal #ambiguous