Iulis Tsakalou BOOK CRITIC
Your book is a shocking narrative surrounding the urban legend of the haunted house of Lechonia Magnesia. What prompted you to choose to describe, with particular success, this story?
The legend refers to the tragic story of the noble family of Kondou, five members of which, three children, the uncle and the father died in a very short time. The common mind might not grasp the magnitude of the evil and attributed it to real and unreal causes. Coincidences of deaths and accidents reinforced the legend regarding the mansion being haunted.
It is a story worth talking regarding that, instead of diminishing following the passage of regarding 125 years, is magnified in the imagination of the world and causes awe and new questions. I was impressed by the endurance of the legend over time, surrounded by mystery and constantly fed with new evidence.
Also, comparing the two eras, then and now, I was fascinated by the similarities of human behavior in love, love, epidemics, loss, zeal for life and starting from scratch, the difference of social classes, etc. . As a deeper motivation there was and still is the wish to find a way to save the beautiful “pink house with the samiamidi” that dominates the area and unfortunately is slowly and steadily falling apart.
The title – I can say – poetic, what exactly does it symbolize? What did you want to signal with your choice?
“The ancestors return stealthily. The ruined mansion awaits them.” They are two sentences that are on the back cover of the book. The title expresses the desire and wish that loved ones who have passed on to the followinglife return and show us signs – coincidences and synchronicities -, help us understand life and solve its riddles.
How do you choose the characters in your books?
First I imagine in rough lines the story I will write and the persons who will staff it. I note what will be the main characteristics of the main characters and some of the minor characters in terms of sex, their appearance and character, their gender, their origin, their education, the influences they have received, the choices they have made until they become involved in the my own story What I like and at the same time fascinate is that those cracks are implied in the text that allow the reader to suspect the underlying reasons why a hero goes once morest his character, why, for example, a very good person behaves at a certain moment cruelly or someone another is tyrannical without a trace of compassion. The imperfections of the heroes add beauty to the telling of a story and mark twists. I am an optimist by nature and that, I believe, comes across in my books.
Death, omnipresent, is presented as both a sad journey into non-existence and an exciting journey into the unknown. Do you, personally, fall somewhere between the two?
Life and death are the greatest mysteries that give rise to philosophical questions and cause different emotions in every person, such as anxiety, fear, peace, awe. It is a theme that often permeates the pages of my books mainly through the way the living see the loss of loved ones and how they themselves manage the gift of life.
We don’t know what we will find on the other side, we can only guess. The way we live and the good testimony we leave behind, if we let it, will be our victory once morest the natural end. If we place ourselves before the immensity of the universe and if we try to give a number to the total number of people who have passed through the planet we get an idea of the natural course of things. I believe, with the last breath we pass peacefully and peacefully to another way of existence or non-existence.
For both the narrator and Ada, words and stories seem to be of vital importance, the criterion that separates the living from the dead. Can one survive if deprived of the ability to tell stories?
Ada, in my story, is a candidate for a PhD in Social Anthropology, her dissertation topic being urban myths. Language and words are the main tool of her work. Through people’s narratives, he reconstructs the history of the Kondou family and is led to conclusions.
The narratives of stories, events, actions are the strong threads of memory that connect the present with the past, that highlight the collective through the uniqueness of each person, that strengthen empathy and cultivate the understanding of human nature. Even when we have no listeners, we think of stories and somehow tell them to ourselves. We read and breathe stories.
What feelings and thoughts do you want to evoke in the reader?
Reading a text is a purely subjective action, so I would be glad, if possible, to learn from the readers themselves the feelings and thoughts that my novel evoked in them. When I finished writing it, I kept thinking mostly regarding life. How short it is and how we would really like to experience it. Social norms and embedded “shoulds”. The many shades of truth, lies, compromises. The fragile relationships of people. The hidden truths. The secrets that concern us and we will never know. The spread of fake news that leads to collective paranoia. And do haunted mansions really exist?
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