1.) Quickly, give us the title and genre of your book and a 30-word or less tagline:
“Kafka’s House”, literary fiction; a book about growing up in Romania of the sixties, and learning how to survive and dream in a closed society
2.) Who is your favorite character and why?
Silvia, the main character, is my favorite character. She never gives up her hope – it just doesn’t occur to her that one can quit.
3.) If you could change ONE thing about your novel, what would it be? Why?
I would try harder to publish first the original English edition; The history of this book is a bit unusual: I wrote it in English, I translated it in Romanian and had the good fortune to have it published by Editura Cavallioti in Romania; then Pixiphoria Publishing House published the digital edition via amazon.com.
4.) Give us one interesting fun fact about your book or series:
While Kafka’s House is pure fiction, it is inspired, to a certain extent, from life, and my childhood in particular. After it got published in Romania, I read it carefully one more time and was satisfied with it being devoid of any resemblance with actual persons. But after my mother read it, she came to me and said: “What a nice memoir. I can tell you who each and every person in this book is. I recognized everyone.”
….So much for an author’s ability to fictionalize.
5.) How can we contact you or find out more about your books?
My blog: http://therighttopublish.blogspot.com/
6.) What can we expect from you in the future?
That’s a tough one. We’ll see…
7.) And now, before you go, how about a snippet from your book that is meant to intrigue and tantalize us:
I don’t know about tantalizing, but if someone smiles reading this fragment of “Kafka’s House”, I’ll smile along:
“-Listen to this, my friend Duck says. My own grandfather. It happened last night.
I am curious. Her grandfather does all kinds of crazy things.
-What?
-Last night, Duck says, he comes home late and doesn’t want to wake up grandma. Because she always scolds him, why did you drink again, and so on. And he’s hungry, right? So he looks for food and finds some soup in a pot. So he starts eating it. And this morning I hear him telling grandma:
-Ileana, you should’ve boiled that meat in the red pot a little bit more, Ileana, I couldn’t eat a morsel of it, it was that hard to chew!
And grandma says:
-You fool, you drank again last night, didn’t you?
-Who, me? Drank? says grandpa and crosses himself. So help me God.
-So help you God, ha? says grandma. The devil will take charge of your soul as soon as you die, not a second later, because you take God’s name in vain! So you see, you old fool, how drunk you were, in the red pot I had a dishcloth with which I cleaned the pot, on top of which I added some water. That water was for the pig slops and that thing you chewed on was the dishcloth, not a piece of meat!
-He tried to eat the dishcloth?! I ask, and Duck nods to me, shaken with laughter. We both laugh so hard that our eyes fill with tears.”
