When it all becomes Clear

Clare Azzopardi and I actually chatted back in April and it happened to be the 3rd anniversary of Castillo’s launch, so this discussion was particularly fitting and consuming!

I love it when I get to talk to a writer about just one particular work, and how, in quite a short time-frame, we're able to delve deep into the workings of the minds of the characters and how these evolved during the writing process along with the themes that shape the piece. This was one of those kinds of conversations, and I’m really happy to have had the chance to wrap this interview around Castillo, with the beautiful and whimsical Clare Azzopardi. Enjoy!

Shall we start with ‘Castillo's’ cover? It seems as fitting a start as any for a novel!

Two covers were actually made for Castillo; one by Pierre Portelli at Merlin and the other by Glen Calleja. Let’s start with Merlin’s version. As you know Castillo is in many ways a detective/thriller story, even though it’s not quite so straightforward. There’s always an ongoing investigation - Cathy who’s writing Castillo’s detective stories and Amanda who’s investigating Cathy as well as her mother. It’s yellow because detective novels are called ‘giallo’ in Italy. The idea and design is totally Pierre’s - with the C’s depicted as handcuffs, quite clever I thought, and the duct tape of course represents the fact that many times you are silenced in such scenarios.

Then there’s Glen’s. As you know, Castillo is made up of a lot of boxes; physical as well as psychological ones - Emma Barbara catalogues everything and places them in boxes and so he wanted to play with this idea. It’s all in a box, the book is in another book, and then you open it by unravelling the linen rope/string - it’s quite uncanny because our protagonist is going into her mother’s house and opening her boxes to connect things together, and so the reader also has this sort of rite of passage, to arrive to the story.

On the cover you have written ‘mhux kulħadd jiddeċiedi li jmut’ (‘not everyone chooses to die’), why is that?

Well there are different kinds of death in the novel. There are people who die because of others, there are people who are killed off, and there are those who die before they die.

As a writer, how much of you is in ‘Castillo’? How are the common threads that link your works together shaped by you and your experiences?

In Castillo, Amanda, who is one of the protagonists, has a daughter named Klarissa, and she’s very much obsessed with this girl. And so here I’m writing about this thing which I do not have. Many times with writing, we either write about what we’ve been through, what we’ve experienced - and there’s a lot of me in this book, a lot of what I passed through in the 80s. There’s a mix of memories and we’ll talk about memory soon. There are also situations which others have experienced, and then there are also those things which you haven’t passed through and you either wish you had, or which you imagine yourself to have passed through. In other words, because you haven’t passed through it, you write it, and once you write it, it is as though you have passed through it.

Yes, I understand.

And this is Amanda, who married and had a child. And she is someone, who even though she might not be a 100% sure how to be a mother, she is trying to be the best mother because her own mother was not - ultimately she left her.

So she has nothing to go on.

Exactly, and perhaps because of that she becomes almost obsessive around her daughter, especially towards the end...actually there are moments throughout when I wanted the reader to doubt whether Amanda actually had a child, or if she was just making her up, you know. But then I decided not to go down that path. The obsession is still there and I did have people ask me whether she would actually leave her daughter, so evidently there was still that feeling, that possibility. I’m not sure if you felt it? Especially at the end, when she takes her to school and doesn't want to leave her...she’s almost too much. It’s so exaggerated that she doesn’t want to let go; I think that if I had to continue the book perhaps Amanda would eventually leave her daughter. She would be tired of this overwhelming obsession and would end up going a bit mad and leaving.

Mmm I understand what you mean. I think for me it was more of an anxiety I felt around Amanda.

Okay, yes.

That anxiety of not knowing, of not being sure of yourself or your capabilities and always questioning ‘is this the right thing to do?’. For me it was more about that and so it never came to mind that she would leave her daughter. I think she wouldn’t want to do what her mother did, but then again, you never know.

Exactly, and you know this thing of anxiety Ruth, it’s something I also wanted to show because I never wanted to link being a woman with being a mother; or being a mother and being a naturally good mother. Society seems to tell us that if you’re a woman then you should be a mother, and if you’re a mother you’re a good one. If you’re a bad mother, it’s bad, you know. But the fact is that there are some mothers who are not good mothers, yet they only find that out once they’re mothers. And so I wanted this anxiety to come out. We are not all perfect and we are definitely not all what we are made out to be - it’s not all rosey (‘ward u żahar’ as the Maltese expression goes).

Yes I really felt it when she said something to the tune of ‘nobody loves her like I love her, not even her dad’...

Exactly and it also stems from fear, the wound of her mother leaving and so there’s also this fear that she is capable of doing the same. In a way, there’s a higher chance that Amanda will not be the one to leave but perhaps, just perhaps, if Amanda had to leave it would be for the same reason her mother did.

You know that her mother passed through something that triggered her to leave. Now I’m not saying that she was a good mum to start with, there could have already been signs that Emma Barbara was not fit for marriage or motherhood; and these reasons were there in my mind, at least. And then, her sister dies and this triggers her to leave everything and go back to her mother. I think what she’s really doing is she’s trying to find that thing that she didn’t have with her own mother - a proper bond.

So true.

Because we know that her mum preferred her twin, and that Emma was always in her shadow, right? So now she’s thinking ‘okay, now my sister has died, and I’m the only one. So my mother has to love me’. There’s this reasoning going on - because how can it be otherwise? Unfortunately her mother goes mad, she doesn’t remain lucid and so she can never give her the love she is craving. The love which Emma was now waiting for.

Yes. You know, I like this cycle of…

Motherhood. I tried to explore the different realities of motherhood.

Yes, motherhood because even with the dad here, the father becomes the mother in many ways. There’s also this cycle of the nurturing of bonds and the broken bonds for that matter. This fixation on the need to fix something when it’s perceived to be broken.

Yes yes. That’s what’s really significant about the plot. I was really interested in exploring the roles of different women. Mothers, wives, women who didn’t have children, women who love women; we have different voices here. We have a mother who realizes she isn’t a good mother. We have a mother who leaves her family. I really wanted to explore these themes profoundly.

I also liked the men in your story, they’re very calm and accepting.

Yes, very! My dad is an extremely calm person so I think that it must be coming from him, we love him very much. I come from a very traditional family; my mum stayed home and dad was always out at work. Mum was the one who brought us up really, but dad was very calming to be around. He was the one to cook, he always bought groceries and things like that, he was the one to take us to school and help us out with homework. So in Castillo, even though the men do not have a prominent part they are still important. There’s Matteo, and Amanda’s dad who after all, brought her up in his own way: he doesn’t talk that much, very quiet. We know that something happened at work which made him leave but we’re not sure what; his wife left him, but still he loved his daughter and she really got to appreciate him later in life - after all he’s all she had. Then Amanda finds Mat who is also calm, he enjoys cooking, and takes her with a pinch of salt in the sense that he knows her peculiarities and humourisms, so he doesn’t make a fuss of things, he calms her…

And even because of the structure of the story, you have this jumping from one reality, one story to another, Matteo actually recedes quite a lot at one point. Then once in a while you hear his voice and at the end of the day it seems to be the voice of reason.

Very much so. We also have Castillo himself. Castillo is of course fictional, and he is very much the image of the macho male figure; I mean the policeman of Malta haha…

Exactly, and he is also the kind of man who doesn’t marry the woman he loves because he’s so focused on work.

Mmm, promessi sposi (a kind of “promised betrothed”) always promises to marry but never goes through with it, or never finds the right time.

But he is a good man, he starts off his career with true justice at heart and he really wants to do the right thing for his country. Yet unfortunately, as many others whose power goes to their head, he ends up corrupting himself and thus becomes another corrupt police. Even though he is the last man you think or would want to imagine becoming so. This is of course mirroring what happened in Malta in the 1970s to 80s. I don’t know if you realised, but the storyline of the Tonna brothers is based on an actual case. I changed the names but there are certain parts which are literally transcribed from the newspapers of that time, when Nardu Debono’s case was going on. They were cousins - I made them brothers - and had planted a bomb for the Commissioner of the time, and it didn’t go off, or it did at the wrong time and no one was killed. They had taken him up to the depot, they killed him there and then threw him in a valley. It was this case that really created an uproar and started the chaos and troubled time of the 70s to 80s. And so this is Castillo; I wanted to show this historic part, our story as a country, but depicted through fiction, the stories of Castillo. This is why I told you we’ll talk about memory, as I tried to play with memory and reality, fiction and fact.

What really occurred I placed into the crime novels of Cathy Penza, so that it was as though she invented them. There was another murder which took place at the China dock (dock number 1) which I mention. Even the fine details, such as the brand of cigarettes used, I knew they existed at the time. Some things were researched especially when it came to the appropriate language and the expressions.

Even the places, especially in Valletta - I remembered them from when my grandfather used to reminisce about his childhood. So that was really special.

The beauty of writing about the past is that you know you will have readers who remember, know or recognise the details and thus make the story their own. I relish when readers come up to me and say something like “I lived that…” or “I remember that…”. At the launch I was interviewed by Claire Bonello and she told me how she had laughed because I mentioned a Toledo, and her father had one. And my father had one too! So it was funny, it was like we were all running around in Toledos, and most of them were beige or whatever, caffe latte.

So yes when you’re writing about the past, even if the memory is imperfect, impinged upon - memory does fail us after all, we remember things perfectly sometimes but we also imagine up others and reinvent memories - I still wanted these to be pleasant reminders of a time lived by many readers. This is what makes it interesting I believe even for the reader.

How much do you remember of these events?

Well I was born in 1977, so I was very young in the 1980s. Let’s see, the killing of Nardu Debono was in 1980 so I definitely don’t remember it - that was purely research. I had done a lot of research through the old gazettes. Then the details, such as the cigarettes Castillo smokes I took from the brand my dad smoked. I can just remember the box so vividly, and my mum taking one, once in a while. So certain things are true to me. Other things aren’t, for example the bomb that kills Cathy is the bomb that went off in Sliema, which is true, there was a bomb placed in a car next to the police station and people walking past had died.

So even though I don’t remember these instances, and I researched them, what I tried to show is that...well depending on whether we are Nationalists or Labourites we have a certain narrative, a memory of the 70s and 80s, from what our family or friends tell us. And it’s as though this memory changes depending on whether you’re blue or red. This is similar to what goes on if you see either the NET or the ONE today - you’re going to have two different versions of the present.

Everyone knows the facts - we all know that bombs were placed at certain places and sometimes for certain people, we all know how Raymond Caruana and Karen Grech died - yet the intensity and the details change. And this is something I’ve tried to show without going too much into the politics of it, and I’m almost making fun of it too. Cathy Penza dies, after all, when Raymond Caruana dies; but because she was a nobody, nobody remembers her. And so the question of whether they wanted to actually kill Cathy arises, or whether she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Both these two scenarios could be plausible: either as she was writing about Castillo’s corruption there was someone who wanted to kill her, or else it just wasn’t for her. There’s no need for me to tell you that one thing happened for sure, you’re free to think anything you want because either way, it’s just as bad.

Yes, that’s true.

And then this book actually came out just after they had murdered Daphne Caruana Galizia. So I remember this clearly, Daphne’s car was bombed in 2017 and I knew this was coming out at the beginning of 2018. It was very ugly in a way to have gone back to what happened in the 80s, and that’s exactly what that bomb did. It took us back, it reminded us of such a corrupt time, yet the media were doing it in an inappropriate way, by comparing the wrong things and just blaming the other party. We needed to be able to live in the gravity of the situation of the present time. Today I hope that people are seeing these events differently, because today it is very clear that she died because of corruption.

This is reminding me of what we touched on a little before, when it comes to cycles and things repeating themselves. I have come to see these cycles, patterns, in many things. And here again we have the death of a journalist and your book coming out; we are naturally reminded of the 80s, but we can perhaps also appreciate how little we have changed too.

Yes, definitely.

Even with Daphne’s death we could see partisanship coming up, and what you thought about her death really depended on who you support - which really has nothing to do with it.

Unfortunately our politics blinds us, it doesn’t let us grow. At that time Oliver Friġġieri wrote something on the lines of us being one tribe with two flags - which is quite true. This partisan politics really is responsible for placing blinkers on our eyes and it doesn't let us see what’s really going on, it doesn’t leave space for us to ask the right questions. We never ask the right questions. We never stop to reflect.

And that is why Cathy Penza’s death had to remain a question, and it wasn’t important to solve it. The fact that there was a bomb and she died was already bad enough.

Now Emma Barbara, naturally, did not think of it in that way. She was suddenly given promotions, and her mother drove her crazy to see the workings going on to hide her sister’s murder and this is how her obsession starts. Then eventually she hires a hitman to kill the person she thought made the bomb!

Without any proof.

Exactly. Even if she thought she had proof, there was really no way she could prove it. This goes to show what happens when we are blinded, when we are obsessed and overly anxious.

I also wanted to show that this decision did have repercussions on her life; Emma eventually takes her own life. These thoughts and deeds surely remained on her mind, and I think at the end the fact that they do means that she’s sorry. I also think that she expected her daughter to come and find her; she got to meet her, to see who she had become, she told her this huge secret, and that was enough. She almost had to leave Amanda again so that there wouldn’t be any repercussions on her life.

It was the only unselfish act in a way.

Mhm, her only way to redemption perhaps. She left Amanda her house and her sister’s house; at least she left everything she had and she wouldn’t remain part of her life because she had murdered someone. I wanted to give Amanda this kind of life, even though the things she is left are mainly empty, they are still full - of boxes and memories. She can then do with these as she wishes, as she can also retell the story to Clarissa in any way and manner she wants. She can choose to omit the part that her mother killed, and so on.

Did you want to say something about Cathy Penza and the themes that come up?

Cathy Penza is important because we never had a woman writing detective stories in Malta before. So I wanted to come up with a woman who really tackles this genre. Castillo is her hero, coming from a working-class family, he really had to push himself and do everything to get to where he was, until she decided to corrupt him and go with the times in a way. I also wanted to do something that wasn’t really done before, myself, as a writer.

And there’s a sort of game within the book. The narrative of Emma and Amanda is the one I made up, but in many ways it’s the real part; then the novels that Cathy Penza writes which are supposed to be fictional are actually based on fact. So even here there’s a reversal of sorts.

And in many ways they’re merging.

Yes, this happens naturally because at the same time the narrative thread follows through - Cathy dies because of Castillo, because of Emma this and that happens, so they do affect each other and on both sides there are a lot of investigations going on. This was one of the first things which popped into my head, and I really wanted to carry it through mainly because memory is also like a game - it toys with us, we’re never quite sure what happened, we may choose to change memories, and every time we choose to recount it we add and we subtract something. I really wanted to mirror our collective memory, as a country.

Immanuel Mifsud once said that we bind nostalgia with memory, which is true. I think with remembrance there is always an element of nostalgia. Yet nostalgia is not always about the beautiful memories of childhood, it is really also about the sadness and the pain that comes with the good times. This is why he terms it as memorja bil-vistu or nostalġija bil-vistu (memory and nostalgia “in mourning” so to speak).

And then there are also the neighbours, the woman who is depicted as a witch, a hag; these are people we don’t really look at anymore but they really deserve our interest and they are still around us.

Of course there’s Ġina, who I really empathize with - she is the woman who has nothing, you know. She is the type of woman who is unfortunately totally dependent on her husband, and in our society we had a lot of these.

And we still do…

Yes exactly, they’re usually not educated or they don’t work and they end up just bringing up the children, remaining dependent on the husband who works. Her husband happened to be the conman, perhaps he wasn’t, but what we do know is that he wasn’t the ideal husband. When he dies he leaves her with a lot of debt and the men who were supposed to be his friends, actually come and take everything, and she’s left with absolutely nothing.

So it’s this story of a woman who thought everything was fine and yet the next thing she knew it was all gone. At least she does have the house, she’s not thrown out, and Amanda actually gives her all the furniture she needs.

I took it as a call in a way for the reader to question for themselves - ‘who am I?’. Perhaps even without wanting to we start to associate and see how we would react, who we would be more like. Perhaps since there is so much loss, we can even question - ‘...is my life empty?’.

There’s quite a paradox here, because the houses of Emma, Cathy and Anne are full to the brim with things and then you have Ġina’s house which is void of material items.

The exploration of silence is interesting too. First you have it with…
The dad…

Yes, and the silence of death, but also remembering the silence that persisted before.

Yes, this silence is wonderfully depicted in Rilke’s elegies and I also explore it further in my new book SURA which we can talk about later.

Then I guess there is also the silence of that which remains unsaid.

There is always a lot which is unsaid, and in this silence there is a lot to discover. This is up to the reader and each reader will discover different emotions. Of course there is a lot being said within the silence too. We don’t always have to say everything, right? The silences are as important; the silence between one thing and another carries a lot of weight and meaning. They give the reader space to think and reflect, or simply to be left alone, in silence. In this noisy environment that we live in, we need this kind of space. This silence also gives the characters space. Amanda for instance, is one of the characters who is taught (by her father) that they can communicate in silence.

He’s quite economical with words! And when he grows older he buries himself in silence. Amanda does not understand at first. She even comments that ‘He died before he died’. There’s a point in his life when he decides to sit in his armchair and do nothing. He finds himself a hobby that requires patience and silence and does nothing else. He simply has nothing else to recount. There is a certain beauty in a character like this but there is also pathos. In the sense that he either really has nothing to say, which is quite sad; or he has a lot to say but he’d rather not. Amanda is the one struggling with this silence she is brought up in, but then she understands it, accepts it, embraces it (for different reasons than those of her father).

I think there is a certain sadness in the way that he died before he died. And in many of the characters there is this sadness, which is natural - life - yet perhaps there’s the expectation of what needs to be said and what doesn’t, it’s different for everyone. But also being okay with the silence of another person.

Mmm with being okay with someone not telling us everything, or anything. Yes, and we see this with Amanda. She took a while to accept her father, but eventually she could.

There’s also the silence between the extracts that I’ve chosen of Cathy’s works. They are in many ways a form of emptiness because the reader never gets to continue the story.

So did you write the stories in their entirety?

No, I would have an outline of the plot, I’d know exactly what it’s about. I’d write certain parts and then choose from there. Some were developed more than others, but I chose the bits I liked best. This too is a conscious allowance of silence, of emptiness and space.

Mmm and that can be such a tease in a way because they are in themselves so interesting. I found myself hoping that some chapters would be a continuation, to be able to finish the inner stories too!

And in fact that’s why you have some of them being repeated, because I wanted to be able to give a bit more.

Within this going back and forth between stories and timelines there’s also a lot of mirroring and repetition within Amanda’s narrative itself, especially when she’s going over her own memories.

I think it’s important even if just to remind the reader where you left off. At the beginning you might think ‘what’s going on?’, so it is important to repeat, especially because there is the space to do so.

Yes, and it’s also something we do naturally when we go over things in our mind. It’s interesting to me because many times it’s a conversation with herself.

Amanda is that type and even Emma in many ways, because she likes to repeat things, but then the story is being told by Amanda so we are experiencing everything as she perceives it. And I’m not sure if this came to mind, but Amanda can be somewhat unreliable. I think the reader has the chance to ask if she should be trusted at all. She’s so all over the place and so anxious and she’s passed through so much that I think the reader can easily ask, ‘okay, what is she leaving out?’. Because everyone leaves things out, she’s even leaving bits out from her aunt’s novels - that’s her choice.

And she is so uncertain of herself as well, so I see why you would say this.

I did this because in many ways in our own life we never have the full picture, right? I feel like I don’t have the full picture of the 80s either. When I asked my dad what happened, he would either decide not to say anything (because sometimes people don’t want to remember really), or when we were younger he’d tell us something and then if I asked him the next year he’d tell it in a different way. If I asked my mum she said another, so you build your picture from these fragments and yet it is still unreliable because you have unreliable narrators.

And that’s very frustrating.

Very, and I think Amanda has this feeling and expresses it.

Then she has another picture from Anne.

Yes, that’s another thing. So she’s telling us the story and we’re not sure if we can trust her, but at the same time she is being told the story by others, so even she is uncertain of who to trust as they change their versions. She’s always being given more by Anne, but I’m sure she doesn’t give her everything.

And this begs the question in many ways of why, why don’t we say it all as it is?

I think it’s fear, Anne had her own reasons and we also see fear with Ġina when she asks Amanda not to tell anyone that they have taken everything from her. It’s the fear of what others will think.

And we’re still very much like that.

Yes very much, and because of it we remain closed in. There are a lot of factors that play into this and affect what is said and what is unsaid. This might be the other big theme of the novel.

I’m thinking of how this can relate to our own lives - what we choose to say and what we don’t, between family and friends.

Mhm and I don’t think you can ever tell everything to anyone. Because then what remains yours?

Yes and this ties into how you can’t just have one person be your everything.

Exactly.

Because even Amanda needs all these other people to get to where she wants to be, to tell her what she wants to know, even though Matteo is the one who gives her the space to do so.

I wanted to put this out there, you know it’s about being able to be so comfortable with a partner that you know they’re not telling you everything but that it’s alright - there’s no need to know everything. You have to understand that you’re not going to know everything about a person; and you don’t want to know everything about a person!

Do you write your friends or family?

More or less, sometimes. My dad was very gentle, quiet and calm so there are these traits in both Matteo and Robert. I must take a few characteristics from the friends around me, and even my own. But then when you’re writing, the character somehow takes on a life of its own, so it doesn’t remain its fragments. And in truth the process is so long that the character really does develop and transform into someone very different.

The importance of the photographs changes throughout the novel, they were very important at the beginning and then sort of disappear.

Yes, I really wanted them to feature at the start because they are very much like her dad. He’s very static, so it’s as though he’s always in a photograph.

I also wanted to show that there was nothing really important going on in her life. The important parts were captured in a photograph - her first day of school, her first holy communion - and then everything stopped because her mother left and it’s as though nothing was celebrated after that. Even the house remained very much untouched. And with the photographs of her dad’s there’s also this little game with Gaddafi, we forgot to mention it. Her dad is with his police unit and they had a photo with him and this was an important moment for him.

I didn’t mention the photographs again because they remained a reminder of these few photos with her mother, aunt and Anne and that’s it. So they were not important to her, she also never mentions taking photos of Klarissa, even on her first day of school.

And perhaps it became more important to live the moment too.

Yes we can say that.

Then when it came to putting Gaddafi into the picture, it was pretty easy. He came to Malta many times. During my research I even found a particular itinerary of his visit in the 70s: from as soon as he landed till his departure, all the meetings, gatherings and places where he was to dine etc etc …A whole weekend published in the gazette! So I thought that this was interesting, and I had to put him in. I wanted to make fun of the fact that everyone must have had a photo with him, because he went everywhere and met everyone!

So her father had one, Anne worked at Castille so she must have had one, she had a party and took Cathy so they had a photo, Cathy was writing about Castillo so he had to have one too, Tommy was a cook at San Anton and had one!

And what about John?

Haha, I don’t know. We have to ask Emma.

So he was just imaginary?

Yes, I think so. She just invented him as an excuse, to have someone to talk about, something to say. Emma is a woman who made the wrong decisions in life. Maybe this is some drawback of being a twin because you’re always in the other’s shadow, I don’t know.

In her case, she became a teacher because her sister did so, maybe that wasn’t the right choice. Then to do something different when she met Robert she just married him, her sister had told her he wasn’t right for her. Maybe she was right, maybe that was also a bad decision. Then she had a child, another bad decision. She left her family to go to her mother after Cathy’s death, because she thought she could re-establish the bond with her mother, another bad decision. She killed Tommy Grech (or she did not), perhaps both decisions were bad in the end. As you can see, one bad decision after another. John is the man she creates to be able to have something that is hers. Was this a bad decision? I don’t know.

What’s interesting is that she never complains about her situation, she never even tries to excuse what she did, which is nice about her, because she is ultimately alone.

Yes, and there was another bad decision - she completed Cathy’s unfinished novel. You can call these what you want, but perhaps she could have done things differently. To her mind they must have been good decisions. When it comes to leaving Amanda, she says it was the best decision because she knew she wouldn’t raise her properly.

I don’t want to judge her. I mean all of us make decisions at the spur of the moment and then we might regret them. I tried to create these moments and decisions that are realistic, but which are also bigger than life, because it’s fiction after all and I wanted it to be fun.

Perhaps because they are fictional events and characters we can empathize more with them? In a weird way.

Yes, perhaps.

Are the names particularly important?

Cathy is actually after my grandma who was Catherine, then Penza is Albert’s grandmother’s surname. I like the name Emma. Klarissa is mine, my piano teacher used to call me Klarissa and I really loved her and the name became quite special to me. In a way it’s a game too.

I make sure that, especially for kids, I’m using names that mean something, the kind Charles Dickens made up. Saver Demolizz, for example, is Saver because he’s severe and Demolizz because he ends up demolishing schools. I have a lot of these; Rebus Totall is one of the latest and his name says it all.

I thought that because of how the pronunciation of Klarissa changes throughout the book, it implied that with Klarissa now everything became clear for Amanda, that she needed nothing else but her daughter in reality.

That’s interesting, I like this idea.

The epitaph you use by Peter Handke is also interesting.

Yes, that’s from a memoir about his mother and there is this toying with memory. It’s kind of a game with what becomes of fiction and what remains factual, and the facts end up as fiction whilst the fiction becomes fact. And it had been a while since I read it but it made sense to use it. He says that everything can be a bit fictitious even if it is real.

Has Castillo been translated?

Yes, it has been translated into English by Albert Gatt, but not yet published. The English translation is used as a bridge language for other translations; for instance Abdelrehim Youssef, a famous writer and poet who was one of Inizjamed’s guest authors back in 2011, has translated it into Arabic and is going to be published in Egypt by El-Maraya. Virginia Monteforte has also translated it into Italian. At the moment it is also being translated into Hungarian and will be published by L’Harmattan.

Are you working on something special at the moment?

Now SURA is coming out, and I am quite excited because this book will showcase my very first ever poems. I always thought I wouldn’t be able to write poetry but then this project came up and it has also changed the way I write, sort of. It truly was a great project in which I collaborated with artists Glen Calleja and Lori Sauer. They are the creators of the dolls. I am the creator of their stories/poems. The book has 20 texts about this amazing doll collection which were exhibited at Spazju Kreattiv last May under the curation of Elyse Tonna. The photos of the dolls in the book were taken by the amazing Giola Cassar.

A book such as Castillo is a reminder to me of the beauty of seeing life, of looking at it from a distance and what it means to truly live it. Why? Mainly because it talks about the opposite. Many of the characters are almost static, living within a bubble, not fully realised and yet full of potential. As with the houses Amanda inherits, we can question ‘what makes my life full?’ and ‘what makes my life empty?’ - and really reflect and act upon our answers.

Castillo is a call to action of hope - live your life to the full without fear!

Thank you Clare

P.S. Look out for SURA - coming out soon, plus more details and contexts from the links below.