{"id":4066,"date":"2012-04-23T23:10:10","date_gmt":"2012-04-23T23:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.victoriahislop.com\/?p=4066"},"modified":"2016-09-15T17:42:44","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T17:42:44","slug":"victoria-in-interview-with-anthony-gardner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/victoria-in-interview-with-anthony-gardner\/","title":{"rendered":"Victoria in interview with Anthony Gardner"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Photo \u00a9 Nikos Vatopoulos<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For Victoria Hislop, falling in love with the Mediterranean was not a slow burn, but something akin to standing under a hairdryer. \u2018I remember the aeroplane doors opening,\u2019 she says, \u2018and this hot wind unlike anything I\u2019d felt in Britain \u2013 this unbelievable warmth.\u2019 She was fourteen years old, and had only known seaside holidays in Bognor Regis or Felpham in West Sussex (\u2018We used to rent a flat above a shop owned by a man with a glass eye who terrified me, and we\u2019d sit on the beach, cold and wrapped up and feeling uncomfortable.\u2019) But then a friend of the family suggested taking a holiday flat in Malta; trips to Minorca and Athens followed, and there was no looking back: \u2018I was so happy \u2013 and now I can\u2019t keep away.\u2019<\/p>\n

It has been a profitable passion. In the last nine years she has written three bestselling novels set in southern Europe \u2013 two of them (The Island<\/em> and The Thread<\/em>) about Greece, the other (The Return<\/em>) about Spain. The Island alone has sold more than two million copies, as well as spawning a 26-part series on Greek television. Part of the proceeds has been spent on a house on Crete which she owns with her husband Ian, the editor of Private Eye, and another substantial portion on the Greek language lessons she has been taking for the past three and a half years.<\/p>\n

\u2018I can\u2019t yet pick up a Greek novel and read it,\u2019 she says, \u2018but I can do a live television interview at seven in the morning. For the first few visits to Greece to promote The Island I had a translator, and I hated it: I felt as if everything I said was going through a gauze. Also, there was an elderly man on Crete who was a good friend of mine \u2013 someone who\u2019d had leprosy \u2013 and I thought, \u201cIf I don\u2019t get on with it I\u2019ll never be able to have a proper conversation with him.\u201d He died last year, very sadly, but by the end I could visit him in hospital without anyone else being there, and that was a great reason to have learnt.\u2019<\/p>\n

As this story suggests, success has not given Hislop any airs or graces. She radiates cheerful, down-to-earth Britishness, albeit with an overlay of Continental chic. Today she looks formally elegant \u2013 simple silver jewellery, bright blue dress, knee-length boots \u2013 having come from a memorial service for another celebrated Hellenophile, Patrick Leigh Fermor.<\/p>\n

\u2018There was nothing in Greek,\u2019 she reports, \u2018which made me sad. There was so much Greek poetry that he knew and would have loved. My ear was crying out for it.\u2019<\/p>\n

For her Spanish novel, she learnt a different kind of language \u2013 dance. \u2018Granada, where I set The Return<\/em>, has a very strong flamenco culture,\u2019 she explains. \u2018Every lamppost is covered in posters advertising a concert, usually in some dingy basement bar. It\u2019s\u00a0 a really vibrant place: you could never be bored there. It has a huge amount of tradition, and amazing food, and there is a great sense of a city in a landscape. If someone told me I had to spend the rest of my life there, I\u2019d be very contented.\u2019<\/p>\n

What draws Hislop as a novelist, however, is the sense that \u2018so much is hidden\u2019 beneath the surface of the beautiful places she writes about. In The Island it was the story of a leprosy colony; in The Return<\/em> and The Thread<\/em>, the experience of families divided by civil war. \u2018The Return<\/em> grew out of seeing these elderly people wandering around and thinking to myself, \u201cThey lived through all of that, yet there is no monument to the people who died fighting for the Republic. Why not?\u201d Which was very\u00a0 na\u00efve, of course, because Franco was in control for so long, and he was the one who set up the monuments and wrote the history of the Civil War.\u2019<\/p>\n

In Greece, when writing The Thread<\/em>, she found the legacy of internal strife closer to the surface: \u2018There\u2019s a lot of talk of \u201cbetrayal\u201d. My Greek publisher was worried that I was even alluding to it in the book, because anything to do with the Civil War is like sticking your fingers in an electric socket and standing in a bucket of water \u2013 so I wrote it very, very carefully.\u2019<\/p>\n

You certainly would not expect the inheritors of such dark histories to be grateful to a foreigner for putting them in the spotlight; but according to Hislop, the response in Greece has been overwhelmingly positive. \u2018I get a lot of messages on my website, and they say really nice things \u2013 very emotional, because the Greeks can\u2019t hold things back. They\u2019re grateful because I\u2019ve given them detail that they didn\u2019t know, and they\u2019re happy that their story is being delivered to them in a relatively simple form, which is what my novels are: they\u2019re not complex.\u2019<\/p>\n

The emails she ignores are those from people encouraging her to use their family stories as material. \u2018I think that\u2019s a very dangerous thing to do, and a very dull one,\u2019 she says. \u2018Where\u2019s the imagination involved? Every single one of my characters is completely out of my head.\u2019<\/p>\n

She feels deeply for the Greeks in their present economic predicament. \u2018Owning a house there brings you closer to them: you look at your electricity bill and think, \u201cOh, there\u2019s a huge great tax that\u2019s been added on.\u201d There are a lot of people who are struggling, and one shares their frustration.\u2019<\/p>\n

Might she choose a subject nearer to home for her next book? \u2018It definitely won\u2019t be set in Britain, I can tell you that. I remember very little from my English degree except \u201cDrama is conflict\u201d \u2013 and there are no such dramatic starting points in British twentieth-century history. Also, I\u2019m slightly afraid of writing about British people: I\u2019m not sure I\u2019d do it very well. With Greece I feel I\u2019ve built up a bank of knowledge \u2013 and I\u2019m fascinated by it still.\u2019<\/p>\n

Original interview at Europe in the UK <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For Victoria Hislop, falling in love with the Mediterranean was not a slow burn, but something akin to standing under a hairdryer. \u2018I remember the aeroplane doors opening,\u2019 she says, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4068,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,446],"tags":[243,50,27,52,45],"class_list":["post-4066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview-2","category-news","tag-greece","tag-interview","tag-the-island","tag-the-return","tag-the-thread","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}