Javier Castillo went from self-publishing ‘The day sanity was lost’, his first novel, to leading the sales charts in the short space of a few months. Nine years later, that financial adviser with literary ambitions has become a phenomenon in the noir genre, recently driven by the international projection of the series ‘The Snow Girl’, an adaptation of another of his works.
The writer from Malaga will speak today in the EL CORREO classroom about ‘El cuco de cristal’, the latest installment of ‘noir’ fiction. The event, which will begin at 7:00 p.m. at the Bidebarrieta Library in Bilbao, has the support of the Suma de Letras publishing house and the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation.
– I suppose you are often asked about the key to your massive success.
– I think it lies in writing universal stories that everyone can empathize with and creating content with twists that work. Hopefully there will always be someone who enjoys what I write!
The talk
West.
Javier Castillo, author of ‘The Snow Girl’ and ‘The Crystal Cuckoo’.Place and time.
Today at the Bidebarrieta Library in Bilbao at 7:00 p.m.
– But aren’t there questions of style that explain this overwhelming reception?
– There is a particular way of counting. The success may lie in the explosive mix of genres and the use of short chapters, something that was not done here, mixed with a very emotional way of writing.
– Can the reception of the series based on your book ‘The Snow Girl’ boost the sale of the novels? Is there a kind of feedback?
– Yes, many people who did not read give themselves another chance. The audiovisual world is easy to consume without thinking, but it also generates interest in books, to learn more about who has written the plot. On the other hand, there are those who have read your novel and are curious to know how the narrative is captured on the screen.
– Will there be continuity and will we know more about the adventures of the journalist Miren Rojo?
-Hopefully, we are all fascinated by the result, but we still don’t have the green light.
A scar on the chest
– Don’t you feel vertigo at the top?
– No, because I continue to lead my normal life. I like to be greeted on the street, but nothing has changed, I still take my children to school and the family gives me a lot of calm. This ‘boom’ has not caught me with my first novel. What I’ve learned is that it’s great, that the only thing I have to control is what I write. I’m alone in front of the computer and I don’t have to take care of anything else.
– You have confessed that, during your childhood, literature was an escape route. What does it mean today?
– My moment of calm, my refuge in this life that I lead, full of fuss and children.
– What is the starting point of your projects?
– I always start from an initial idea generated by someone who suggests a story, a reading, perhaps a piece of information taken from an encyclopedia or a police file. In the case of ‘El cuco de cristal’ it was a photo of an ‘influencer’ who had a scar on her chest, and ‘The snow girl’ was generated as a response to sensationalist journalism around the search for Julen, the boy who fell into a well. Now I am writing a children’s book that stems from one of the stories I make up to tell my children.
– It is curious that today, when every Spanish town is the scene of a detective novel, you set your novels in the United States.
– What matters is the story, that you can identify yourself, enter into it. I’ve never been to Missouri, but I know what it’s like.
writing and architecture
– The novel stars a woman who has undergone a heart transplant and goes to a small town surrounded by forests, strange characters and events. It seems that she leads us to Twin Peaks but it is not like that, she never renounces verisimilitude.
– My novels have something of revisiting memories, of going into places where something has happened. I played with ambiguity in the first novel, but from the next, I have stuck to the natural, because it connects much more. I have surreal ideas in mind, but here everything is flesh and blood.
– His arguments seem to lead us to crossroads of no return, but he always returns to reality.
– I like to take the reader to places where he does not know how he will end up and what he will find, to places he does not expect to reach.
– Break stereotypes. He is passionate about literature and mathematics. Aren’t his novels about him also equations?
– Writing has a lot to do with architecture. You can be very good at capturing emotions, but it doesn’t work if you don’t place them in a good framework.
– And how do you handle criticism?
– Well, I take it very calmly. Reading is very subjective, someone can tell you that your work is the worst and another that has changed his life. Nobody has the absolute truth. I try to write the book that I would like to read and I do it calmly. The best compliment is the one in which the reader tells me that he went to bed at five in the morning because he couldn’t get away from the novel.