A new thing - online interviews with authors, revealing their feelings, thoughts and secret enthusiasms with regard to Venice. They get to talk about their newest (or most Venice-relevant) book too.

HUGE SPOILER FOR ANYONE WHO HASN’T READ CITY OF MASKS !

Death in Venice is a common concept, but you have your character dying elsewhere to live in Venice. Was this a conscious reversal? Does it reflect your idea of Venice, maybe?
Absolutely not! I hadn’t thought about that till you asked. I don’t buy into Venice as the disease-ridden world Thomas Mann wrote about, in spite of having enjoyed Dirk Bogarde as von Aschenbach and Benjamin Britten’s opera.

The Bellezza of my secondary world, in the country of Talia, is about beauty and yes of course masks. In fact the book was going to be called Where Beauty Wears a Mask and the city’s motto is “BELEZZA E MONETA” which might mean Beauty and Money or Beauty is Money” depending whether there’s an accent on the “e”, which there might not be in capital letters.

I wanted the city to be a character in the novel in its own right – something with a distinctive personality, a personality that is larger than life, always up for a celebration, fanatical about its ruler and sentimental when it believes her lost. Bellezzans love to party and have a strong sense of ceremonial, loyalty and fun. Like all Talians they are deeply superstitious and follow the old goddess religion even if alongside the more recent beliefs and rituals of a variety of Christian church.

So it’s really less about death and more about life. In Lucien’s case a second chance at life, which he loses in his own world. It’s also very much about appearances.

Writing historical novels...do the plot possibilities of mobile phones, distant travel in less than 6 months, and the internet not appeal at all?
I have written “realistic” books. In fact my other most famous collection of books is about Grace, a little Black girl living very firmly in the contemporary world. But you’re wrong, when it comes to teenage fiction, the plot possibilities are far greater in an age when not everything could be discovered at a touch of a screen. Having said that, the teenage characters live firmly in the 21st century and have mobile phones and use the Internet.

Is it important to you to be able to speak and read Italian?
Oh yes. I took my A level in 2000 and since 2001 have been attending a class in Oxford called Reading Italian Literature. I’m coming up to my tenth year of it in September. We read novels and short stories, write essays, speak and give presentations all in Italian. I just love it.

Do you speak Venetian?
Alas, no. Though I had City of Masks read in draft by a Venetian, who complimented me on my use of the word “sottoportego”!

What are you working on now?
Surprise, surprise, a historical novel set in Italy! It was commissioned by Bloomsbury and is about the young man who posed for Michelangelo’s great statue of David in Florence. No-one knows whether such a person even existed, which gives me a lot to play with. It takes place in the period 1501-1504, the only three years of this man’s life when he has adventures – and what adventures!


 

What made you choose Peru as a major setting this time?
That surprised me as much as it surprised you. The truth is I went there on holiday, without even a computer. And then the convent of Santa Catalina grabbed me by the writing finger. It’s the most beautiful convent I’ve ever seen, and I am to convents what you are to books about Venice. But beauty isn’t enough. The thing about Santa Catalina is that it is compellingly strange, in the mix of Moorish and Christian architecture, in its sense of being an enclosed city, particularly at night, when they light it simply by candle and the fires in their stone ovens. I’m amazed that no English writer has set a book there before.

Peru drew me into the theme of skin, after seeing what a colonial and slaving history had imprinted on the faces of the Peruvians. But I was also drawn to write about Peru because of the Andean mummies, the Candelabra Cactus, the fate of guinea pigs, and the town of Arequipa itself – a little Venice 7000 feet above sea level.


The story is told through five alternating first-person narratives. Did you write each of the separate voices in one go or follow the plot and write each as they appeared?
This isn’t the first time I’ve done a multiple voiced book. It’s a format I love as a reader – particularly the way Matthew Kneale does it in English Passengers, and Louise Berridge in Honour and the Sword, which is published next week.
 

There are so many advantages to a multiple voice – you can create a tangible dynamism by strategic baton passing; you can use one narrator to establish the reliability or lyinghoundedness of another, and you can create that ‘LOOK BEHIND YOU!’ tension by showing the innocence of some characters and the machinations of others.

Method? I work out the plot and then decide who’s the best person to carry it at each point.

And for the voices, I love voices, I hear voices … each character has his or her own vocabulary file, preoccupations etc. I suppose I write ‘tics’ for them all.

How much fun was writing  the wholly evil character (Minguillo) and how much do you worry at how seemingly easy this was for you?
Is Minguillo wholly evil? Isn’t he aided and abetted at every corner by the eager reader?  Did you have to turn his pages if he disgusted you so much? This is the point that I wanted to make – we deride the gutter press, but which papers have the highest circulation? I wanted to write about the moral responsibilities of the reader, and Minguillo is the challenge I set. 

Yes, I enjoyed writing Minguillo, loved it -  to an extent which might worry people. But who doesn’t long, sometimes, to pull on a black cape and swish it about, and twirl one’s moustachios and mutilate the innocent? 
 

Do you have a film/book/artist that made a visit to Venice essential for you?
Giovanni Bellini’s paintings. Brideshead Revisited, the original, of course.

Do you remember your first visit?
I was eighteen, alone, and completely vulnerable: I fell hard.

What is your single most magical experience in Venice?
The small canals near Miracoli, late at night, October, a gondola rowed by our friend Bruno, our friend Greg playing the violin, our friends silenced by pleasure.

And your worst?
Watching the acqua alta gush into our house on November 30^th last year.

Where would you live in Venice if you could choose? And why?
I love where I live, but if I had to choose another area it would be near Sant’Alvise.
I love the smell of salt in the air, the high sky, the privacy.

Is there a book (guidebook or not) that you always have to take?
Giuseppe Tassini, Curiosità Veneziane

What music plays on your iPod (or in your head) when you walk around Venice?
Voices – the voices of my characters. Not music. I’m also a very greedy eavesdropper. You get unintentional comedy from tourists, and new vocab from Venetians.

Do you have a favourite …
... Part of Venice Sant’Alvise, Misericordia. But it changes.
... Restaurant At the moment it is the Sicilian Beccafico in Santo Stefano
... Church I love San Zan Degola on the inside, and the back end of Miracoli on the outside.
... Gelato flavour  Coffee
... Pizza topping Romana
 

And what’s your least favourite aspect?
A certain Venetian plumber. And speeding water taxis undermining the foundations of the palazzi, unhindered.

Do you think that Venice is dying/drowning?
Very, verrrrrrrry, slowly. Like us.  But more beautifully.

If you were Mayor of Venice for one day, what would you do?
Well, this would make me unpopular, but …

I would make the police actually enforce the speed regulations on the Grand Canal, with bounties for arrests, and have offenders’ boats impounded.

I would ban bottled water in Venice. Transporting those bottles to and from the mainland costs this planet too much. Anyway, the tap-water in Venice is delicious.

I would offer a rates amnesty to any young people who wanted to set up a proper food shop in the centro storico, and free accommodation for them too.

I would ban groups of more than 20 tourists, who block the calli. More to the point, I would make sure that ban was enforced. Operators who broke the law would have their permits removed.

I’d hire a team to inspect every single piece of scaffolding in Venice and discover if it is actually doing anything. Then I would impose a daily fine per square foot on any useless scaffolding until it was removed. The fine would go into a fund for cleaning graffiti.

I’d deal with the water rat problem this way: I would subsidize Dingo, the cat charity, to set up a cat café in every sestiere, where visiting cat-lovers could drink cappuccini while caressing cats who would naturally solicit large donations.

I would make a decree that all Venetian shop-owners must put the truth about their opening hours on their doors. If they really open only at 9.25, then they must not put 9.00 on their signs.

I would take a team of historians down into the depositories of the Fondazione di Musei Civici and see what treasures have been forgotten.

For my husband’s sake, I would summon all the parish priests of all the churches, and ask if anyone has a campanile that they would like restored for use as an architectural studio.

I’d set up a ‘Shhh in the City’ campaign, to stop people banging doors, playing music and television and shouting into mobile phones in the streets late at night – this causes so much unhappiness in Venice’s narrow streets.

Quite a long day.

But I presume that, as Mayor, in the evening I’d also have to preside at the inauguration of a major exhibition – perhaps about the Conspiracy of Baiamonte Tiepolo. And afterwards we’d have dinner in an exquisite private palazzo with artists, historians and writers, and then walk home over the passerelle at two am, with the streets magically to ourselves.

Although after what I’d done all day, I would probably need the Comandante of the Carabinieri to accompany me.

(Your amused webmaster says: Notice how she goes to town on the question that asks 'What would you do if you were in charge'!)