Non-Fiction > Web exclusive
The Babel Fish Interview
I was interviewed 26 times during my Italian tour for l’Ultimo Alchimista. Some of those interviews have made it onto the web, and I’ve found most of them. Problem is, I can’t read Italian, so I tried using the babel fish translation service. What follows are some choice excerpts from my interview with the popular Italian website Virgilio, translated into broken English, courtesy of babel fish.
In the case you are not interested to devour a book fast and have a shudder costing long the back, THE LAST ALCHEMIST by the Hollywood-born Micah Nathan (who is certainly no enfant-prodige: his graying hair does not lie) then this is not the book for you.
Dark, worrying, gothic and timeless as myth of the Philosopher’s Stone, THE LAST ALCHEMIST would be able to be the start of an excellent career for Nathan. Certainty, this is not just a new NAME OF THE ROSE, but the tension and the mysteries revealed page after page are the envy of Dan Brown, just to cite a name at random.
Then Micah, than impression it has made you up to now in Italy?
A good impression, indeed. Especially to journalistic level. The questions that you have turned me in this due days of interviews they have been all much intelligent and weighted, and the thing has shocked to me not little.
I know that before becoming a writer, you have made a talk show radio and speaker for the motivation of the young people Americans (!!!)… In particular, but, I would want that you told your experience to me in the world of the cinema horror.
Yes, I have produced a called b-movie The Big Kill as a result of my admiration for the kind, above all the horror of the tradition-Zombie therefore very planned from your directors Lucio Fulci or Mario Bava, two authentic geniuses of the field. My film was not good on a technical level but the main problem was I acted in it.
Therefore you made a mistake in acting…
From bad actor, to say it all to you! In that scene of The Big Kill I have had to show my nakedness, and I was embarrassed to my mom having to see it.
Has satisfied you the translation Italian of the title? Is it faithful to the original The Gods of Aberdeen?
Yes, I am enthusiastic. Also why the Aberdeen of the novel is not in Scotland like a European reader could suppose, but in the United States. Confusion, translate literally the true one title it would have been created.
Many critics have spoken to us about your book like of one optimal mix between coming-of-age, thriller, and psychological drama. You satisfied of this definition or find it too much limiting and barren?
Not, why “limiting”? Mine is a book that covers many styles: it is thriller or a mystery? It is still not understood, not even I!
The main personage, Eric Dunne, is your literary alter-ego?
I, from student, have not had the possibility to attend a college aristocratic like that one of Aberdeen: mine, in fact, it was decidedly more modest. Moreover, Eric is a calm and classified type, all the contrary of a me when I was student. And I will not re-use any characters in this book for other volumes: their literary life ends with the last page of this book.
Which are your next plans?
I have already finished my according to novel that will call Jack The Bastard: a concoction between one love story, one revenge tale, a giallo, and a spaghetti-western. When it will exit? I still do not know it: there is also a cinematographic plan legacy to that book and must attend to that before publication is disentangled.
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