INTERVIEW with Iuli Tsakalou
An excellently structured novel that draws you in until the touching finale!
-What does the “HOLY KISS” symbolize in your new book from BELL publications? What triggered your new writing journey?
This book was inspired by some of my father’s stories. The hero, Markos, grows up in a house above his parents’ tavern. He listens to the tunes from the jukebox and the stories of the patrons. This was what I had in mind before the book began to take shape. I knew the title from the first moment. The holy kiss is based not only on what happens, but mostly on what does not happen.
-What would you say is the deepest theme in your own novel?
I would say it has to do with the vacuum. The deficit, the absence. It’s all the things we might wish had happened, but never do. It is all this emptiness alongside real life that flows through us and shapes us. If I may say one more thing, I would say tenderness. Where we find it everywhere, in all its versions
– How did you choose the characters of your books? How much their cruelty and imperfection inspired you and what margin do you leave in your works for the optimism of life?
I love imperfect heroes as much as I love imperfect people. They seem more earthy, more realistic and warmer to me. A person who has not suffered to the core of his being, can hardly sympathize with another person, and I want my heroes, many of them, to be the ones who are in pain. I don’t choose them, but in a way they choose me, they enter my story and make it their own. A lot of people thought I was a pessimist when I was younger. I would say that I am an optimistic realist and so are the heroes of the book. They are as optimistic as possible.
-Do you like to change your narrative ways, to experiment with form?
Oh yes, I love it so much, it’s something I do often naturally and effortlessly. The Holy Kiss has nothing to do with say the book Zelda Gone and Mary Gray that came out before. Just as I enjoy reading different types of writing, so I enjoy writing them.
– How romance, love, pain and friendship shaped Markos’ character.
Let me say, how they shaped each of us. These together with the family, the place where we are born, I consider that they are the first materials that shape our personality, our character. Our visible and invisible aspects.
-What role do deficit, absence and anticipation play in the life of your hero who secretly yearns for a return. Where the wounds of the past will try to heal and the answers to what burdens him will be given.
There are places that hold you captive for many reasons. Maybe because they live there, people important to you, maybe because there you have loved, you have built an entire life. Marcos did not want to drop anchors in his city as much as he had loved it. He was possessed by the invincible feeling of flight. He wanted to leave, move on, disappear. What drove him might be the passion of youth combined with the pain of absence. It was the wounds that were steaming in his place. He needed to see his life and all the people in it from a distance. He had to leave, maybe just to give himself a chance to come back one day.
– In your book the search for love is intense. It cuts through generations and families. What they are looking for, they find, following all? Could it be that besides material love there is also immaterial love?
What Mark was looking for, perhaps, was to love himself. To find a place in which to feel like he belongs. How does it fit into this as a piece of a puzzle? Love is mostly intangible except that it often needs a physical presence to manifest itself. Maybe this is love, this is life.
-Marcos did everything he might.
How far would Fotini Naum go to find herself?
Fotini Naoum has been searching for herself since her early childhood. Through games, endless readings, loves, loves, loves, friendships on the cross, heavenly and earthly relationships, through the scriptures, nine books to date that have been published and others that he keeps hidden or even unborn. She expresses pieces of herself through her creative writing students’ books, book-themed radio shows, and anything else she’s passionate regarding.
Growing up and feeling literature and psychology talking more and more, but also wanting to finally discover in depth the only heroine of her life that kept eluding her, she finished the Synthetic Counseling program and will soon complete the five-year Synthetic Psychotherapy program with hundreds of hours of psychotherapy , supervision and all these beautiful, violent and magical things that bring you close to yourself.
The poet philosopher Emerson once said: what is behind us and what is before us, are small things compared to what is within us.
So Marcos did what he might. Fotini feels the same way, except that she never stops trying. The road to self is a wonderful road with no end. Alas if you just reached your destination like that.
#Fotini #Naoum #love #imperfect #people