1) In your books, dominates mistery and the readers constantly have to hold the breath as far as they discover the puzzle created from the firs page. Your books are considered like the books that paved the way for books like “The Da Vinci Code”. So, if we have to ask somebody how is created this writing stile, and how is it constructed a work that you can’t live in somewhere without finishing it, you are the right oneŠCan you tell us this secret?
1. I’m happy that everyone is giving me credit for “creating” this form of book, but actually my books are Quest novels–it’s the oldest category of story that we have in print. In ancient times, the quest was a search for something that was like an initiation: like Jason seeking the Golden Fleece, Parsifal and the Holy Grail, Odysseus and Dorothy of Oz both looking for “home”. Everyone who is seeking something is on a Quest. Although it is the oldest form of fiction, for a long time in the 20th century, this kind of book was not popular, it fell out of favor, people thought that literature had to be more “cerebral” and introspective. I’m really happy that this has changed and I’m happy if my books have inspired other authors to write these kinds of adventurous novels, too. The only difference I would like to point out, is that in my books the women get to solve the puzzles, have the adventures and challenges.
2) Your book “The Fire” excited us, because one of the characters are from Albania, especially the one who is Ali Pash롔epelena and his daughter Haidee. How did you know our history and Ali Pasha and his story?
2. I knew about Ali Pascha and Haidee since I was very young. They play the most important role in the Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Dumas based his story of Ali Pascha ad his daughter on the earlier Byron poem, Don Juan, where the young Don Juan almost dies in a shipwreck and is rescued by a beauftiful young girl, Haidee. Of course, everyone in Europe including Dumas knew about Byron’s meeting with Ali Pascha, about his continued friendship for the Pascha and about Byron’s antagonism toward the Turks. This meeting and the poems that resulted from Byron’s pen had created shock waves all over Europe and revolutionized European literature. Even the greatest of German poets, Goethe, had said that Byron was his only true successor. It was Byron’s visit to Ali in Albania that had triggered all of this revolution. That’s what inspired Dumas to write about the Pascha too.
3)What is the role of these characters in your novel?
3. In my book, THE EIGHT, I invented a chess set that belonged to Charlemagne and it had been buried for 1000 years. During the French Revolution it is dug up and scattered all over the world, which launches a 200-year-long chess game to find the pieces and reassemble them. When one team captures most of the pieces at the end of the book, they hide them again.
In the opening pages of THE FIRE (the continuation of THE EIGHT) it is thirty years later–in 1822–when we discover that Ali Pascha has been in possession of the most powerful piece of this chess set: the Black Queen. The Turks have surrounded him, he’s been under siege for 2 years–now he must smuggle out the chess piece to the one man who has the power and money to protect it: Byron. Ali sends Haidee and a young boy who is a Sufi, to deliver the chess piece to Byron.
4) You have explained in one of your improvisations the reason why you wanted to put in this novel Albania and Albanians. However, we are interested in the details of this argument… how much and how did you know Albania?
4. Because my book is about chess, I often get letters about it. Someone wrote me a letter and said that a very ancient chess piece had been discovered at Butrint, and sent me a press clipping about it. So each time someone wrote me from Albania I asked about it. Finally I was put in touch with Auron Tare, director of the Albanian National Trust–and he was extremely helpful with information about antiquities, about Ali Pascha etc. He sent me a list of ALL the books in Library of Congress here in Washington DC which deal with Ali. I was able to get a lot of useful information that way about Ali and his family. And he also put me in touch with Professor Irakli Kocollari who translated for me his book THE SECRET POLICE OF ALI PASCHA. I have thanked them both in the acknowledgements of THE FIRE, but I have literally notebooks filled with extra material.
5) One of the characters in the novel is Haide, who undertakes a difficult mission to put out of Albania a relic, which is a piece of chess, “Black Queen”. It seems that this is the headline of the mistery in the novel. What is this chess set? Can you tell us some of the secrets that are around it? Why is that chess set, why is in Ali Pasha’s hand this relic?
5. I invented the chess set in THE EIGHT, called “The Montglane Service.” I said it had been sent as a gift to Charlemagne by Ibn Arabi, the Moorish governor of Barcelona. At the very end of THE EIGHT, we learn that the chess set was actually created by al Jabir ibn-Hayyan–a real person, and the father of Islamic Alchemy. Al Jabir was a famous Sufi scientist, living in the brand-new city of Baghdad–and he had dedicated his early writing to the sixth Shi’a Imam. THE FIRE reveals the story of why al-Jabir had created this (fictional) chess set, and why it had to be smuggled out of Baghdad, and how it eventually fell into the hands of Charlemagne (Which is where the story of THE EIGHT first began.)
6) This kind of literature lift off something real, from historic facts or known characters as in this case, Lord Bajron or Ali Pash롔epelena to be more fastener for readers curiosity. Is there anything real in this story notably for Ali Pasha and Albanian part, or is it only and simply fiction?
6. Although I am writing fiction, I try always to have very accurate details about the real lives and landscapes of the people I am writing about. I want readers to feel that they are walking around inside the novel, along with the characters, that they can smell the same aromas of food cooking and taste the same spices.
The most interesting thing to me in writing THE FIRE was learning about Ali’s connection with the Bektashi Order. I knew a great deal about the Shadhili, the Mevlevi, etc, having lived in Algeria and having spent so much time in Konya. But I found the Bektashis to be the most interesting thing about Ali Pascha. His involvement with these sufis would help to explain a lot about why he might be able to bridge the gap between the Islamic east and Christian Europe.
7) Publishers all over the world are interested in sales. From the other side, media span the success of an author precisely watching the sales and the places where it s published, that means in how many languages is it translated. But, a writer like you in what is interested most?
7. That’s an interesting question. My books have sold in the many millions all over the world, and they have been translated into nearly forty languages. They have never gone out of print.
But they also have never been conventional “blockbuster bestsellers.” I think it is because my books are so unusual–unique really–that I’ve been so lucky to have individual readers, not just masses: that no one has ever tried to push me into writing the same thing over and over, just to keep my sales figures high. That’s very good for me, because I don’t even know HOW to write the same book over and over. For me–even though I am writing Quest novels–each my books has to have a unique story, new and different characters, and a theme where we learn something important as a message about life. Otherwise there’s not point for me in writing a book.
8) How did the passion for literature born Katherine Neville? In which moment of your life did you understand which was the street you wanted to walk?
8. I was about four years old when I made the adults teach me to read, because I was really interested when people read books aloud and I heard these stories. The first one I remember was Peter and the Wolf because it had interesting characters that were animals represented by musical instruments. So at first I thought I wanted to invent the music and the stories. But it was really the stories that were interesting to me. I actually wrote my first book when I was around eight or nine. Most writers I have known tell me that they also started at about that age. But I didn’t get published until I was forty!
9) You are described like the Female Umberto Eco, Female Alekxander Dumas and Female Stephen Spielberg. What does Katherine Neville see in these characters?
9. Well, that was twenty years ago, when people had a lot of trouble trying to categorize my books (they still do!)–and my books were reviewed as science fiction, history, mystery, romance, adventure, spy thriller–if you had read all the reviews at once, back then, you would never guess what my books were about at all! So they called me “the female” everything. The truth is, there still are not many women writing novels with mathematical puzzles and chess and alchemy and conspiracies and secret societies and cliffhanging action-adventure. The only one I can even think of who likes all those things is J.K. Rowling–and even in HER books, the main protagonist, Harry Potter, is a male.
10) And, in the end, in tour books dominates thriller, so that it likes that you come from that world. What do you do, in those hours of your day, when you don’t write?
10. Life is research, as I always say. I never stop doing it. I have just finished a thirty-city book tour in America for THE FIRE. Then I went on Spanish book tour after that. In all these months when I was traveling and being interviewed and talking about my books, I never stopped privately doing research for the books that are still to come. It requires hiking in secret places hidden inside of public places that no one knows about. In Portland Oregon I went at seven in the morning and had a taxi drop me off on top of a hill in a rose garden, where you could see the entire city below and all the mountains around it–it was a place where no one ever goes at that hour. I walked for six hours downhill and through every interesting spot throughout the city. Then I left and changed clothes and did my book signing. I have done this in Venice and New York City and Las Vegas and La Coruna and Algiers–and, for THE FIRE, even in Washington DC. In each place, I learn more about the story of the place itself than you can find in any guidebook. That is the way to make fiction come alive
