Mikel Santiago (Portuguese, Vizcaya.1975) He is a sociologist and musician turned computer programmer., as well as a writer. He emigrated first to Dublin and then to Amsterdam. His sister's piano, that always echoed through the house, It awakened in him a very early appetite for music.. From Ireland he got the ideas to write a first novel, The last night at Tremore Beach, and then others have come, with identical success among readers and critics. His fourth novel, why you grant me this interview, is titled The island of the last voices (Editions B). GINÉS J. VERA
I have read somewhere about Stephen King by Portugalete and after reading your novel I think there is something…
We are already (he tells me with a smile)
At least, I have felt a little in this novel that claustrophobic atmosphere like in that hotel in The glow; something from La Cúpula and another bit from The storm of the century. At the time of writing, like reading, Does one also evoke part of what has been read?, seen what has been experienced?
Of course, the world of fiction itself is a dictionary. It is like an encyclopedia that other authors have often created., and that the authors, in a display of freakism almost, it leaves us and we feel like it. Yo, For example, the hotel of The island of the last voices I visualized it as the hotel from Psycho, the one from the movie Psycho, also almost at the same upward camera angle, on a hill… Of course, The Dome is a book that I loved for the same reasons that I decided to write this. In this novel there is also something of a social experiment, Of course there is also a bar, which also appears in The glow. There's even a character with the same name., that in The Shining, What is Grady?. The former Guardian of The Shining is Delbert Grady.
A wink perhaps?
Of course, is very sought after. I'm a big fan of Stephen King.. Of course, This novel is the one with the most references, It has more style and more portrayal of King's stories of all the ones I have written. The others had more of Ira Levin who was also a great author, Lovecraft's, although this one also has certain Lovecraftian points with its dark objects.
How and when does the germ of The island of the last voices?
This novel came out a long time ago.. Because when I wrote The last night at Tremore Beach, my first novel, I had had that scenario in my head for many years.. Dark, playa, what the sea brings... This is very much for coastal people, this thing about going for a walk on the beach. Well, a thousand years ago I wrote a story called The island of a hundred eyes, which is a thing that is located in Ireland, in the 18th century, and it was a boat that arrived; a boat with a dead man. I had this scene and the object that came from the sea, I was like refining it. And when I finished writing Tremor Beach I tried, I tried to write the novel for the first time with the character of the soldier and I stopped. The years went by, I was making attempts, the character of Carmen appeared. At first it was going to be a choral novel with characters from the town who do things and the story was seen with an almost omnipresent narrator who was telling things, in addition to what I was telling in the first person. But Carmen began to have more strength and grow, was empowered, it came over me, and it ended up being a two-voice novel, which is what it is. Of course there are choral fragments that I have saved from those attempts, but it has remained mainly between two characters.
Music is very present in this novel (I won't say that also in the previous ones). I think it is inevitable if he lived it since childhood and currently plays in a musical group. How did you choose the songs for this work and why this nod to the Bee Gees?? (A group originating from an island, Australia, by the way)
The thing about the Bee Gees is an anecdote that happened to me. They weren't originally the Bee Gees, eran los Gipsy Kings, but the Gipsy Kings gave me the feeling that they didn't pass my filter. I was in Scotland on a trip and ended up in the typical little town where there were, besides, a Spanish girl working and that on the staff there was the typical group of foreigners working: one from Ukraine, a spanish,…a bit like a joke. and at night, The guys wore Gipsy Kings to pick up, a tope, it was a party. And from those memories, of these unusual things in life, I told myself: jo, what detail, Gipsy Kings fans here in Scotland.And it made me so funny that I said: bueno, I'm not going to put the Gipsy Kings... I am a big fan of the Bee Gees, It seems that I have chosen them as a nerdy group, but not, they are very good, What happens is that nowadays you say you're a Bee Gees fan and you can't eat a bagel. Well, that's where the anecdote comes from..
One of the key elements in The island of the last voices it's the box. I don't know if I should say that it is a kind of emotional accelerator., I prefer to ask the author rather than tell something relevant.
The box is that it is a bit of a picture. In itself it's a bit of a riddle., presenting this closed box has this charm, metaphorically it's like a promise, what's inside, where does it come from?…And then it served me to mask everything that I didn't want to give relevance to in the story.. For me the story really is like The birds, de Hitchcock. It's a story of anguish, claustrophobic, like a monster at home, as they say; like in Alien, a closed environment, some characters that really have no connection with the conflict, more than that you have obligatorily linked them. It's almost almost like this inexplicable science fiction problem of The dome. Something happens that has no explanation - and never will.- but it gives us the opportunity to start working on what happens at a social level in a place, how people work. And I didn't want to present a monster. On an aesthetic level it seemed to me that I could have put something else, but the box was a bit like David Lynch with his strange objects that have no explanation and drops them just to make the story work. That and it wasn't a fantastic novel., it's a thriller, I didn't want it to go away, that I slide towards what is not.
