Parallel universe: everything reminds of times and places familiar from books and films, but at the turn of the road, something changes dramatically. In Once Upon a Time in the Light by Canadian Guy Gabriel Kay, you think you are in late medieval or early Renaissance Italy, but at times various elements of the book confuse you: this world is something very distant, elusive, it comes from another dimension. This is the world of so-called “historical fiction,” a literary genre that Kay has served with surprising consistency over the years.

It was introduced to the Greek reading public by the Anubis editions from which Once Upon a Time comes out. There, the old man Danio Cera recalls the past. His passage through the courtyard of Count Umberto, also called “The Beast”, where he will meet the Duke’s daughter Andrea Ripoli, who has arrived there with a secret purpose: to kill the Beast, notorious for his sadism and sexual perversions. . But Kay’s virtues are not limited to the plot and its twists and turns. He has the ability to make the historical era open, alien, in order to penetrate it even more.

Then, especially in The Light, memory and its strange twists play a crucial role. What is the deeper nature of Danio? Is he the one he’s talking about? Did everything happen the way he remembers? In my online chat with Kay, he emphasized his obsession with the element of memory, the so-called “false memory”, as well as “two people’s conflicting memories of the same event.” Chera is a man “haunted by memory”, and the author identifies himself with him.

Along with the memory, of course, the trauma also goes away. “I think the concept of ‘trauma’,” he says, “operates mostly on a more personal level, and not just in so-called major events (like the Holocaust, the Greek Civil War, or the homes of indigenous peoples here in Canada). . Historical fiction, it seems to me, is an echo of these more collective traumas. In my new book, All the Seas of the World, I refer to the persecution of Jews from Spain in 1492, although I “taunt” various historical facts.

Kei is always “teasing” in his books, but he manages to be convincing. “For me, this ‘quarter turn’ to fantasy is something I’ve been doing for years and it gives me a lot of benefits. Firstly, it relieves me of the feeling that I am distorting the inner world of the people of those times when we really do not know how they thought. I prefer to come up with someone who is clearly based on a real person, rather than a real person that I leave alone. It gives free rein to my imagination. Second, if the novel is related to, but not identified with, real events, the reader is not sure where the story will go. I made it clear that I could not accurately trace the past. As a storyteller, I see this as a great advantage, both for the writer and the reader. I always add a short bibliography at the end of one of my books for readers who want to know more about the period my book is based on.”

Thus, our conversation inevitably turns to the studies and books that shaped him as a writer. “Some projects have really played an important role,” he says. “In The Last Image of the Sun, the style of the book was shaped by the northern sagas; in Under the Sky, the great poets of the Tang Dynasty of the 8th century had a huge impact. However, I am usually inspired by the serious, rigorous academic research of the time and place, and I often communicate by e-mail with some of the people who did such research.”

Kay had a rare opportunity in his youth: to study Tolkien’s non-fiction book with the latter’s son. “That was a long time ago!” he says decisively. “It was that terrible year when, in a village near Oxford, the desire to become a writer crystallized in me. I didn’t think I could do it, but I knew it was what I wanted. Something very important that I took away from working with all the sketches and notes of Tolkien was the realization that the works of genius do not come to her mind in finished form. They arise by corrections and editing, and even more so by editing, with false starts and palinodes… This happened with Tolkien, and I had the opportunity to see all these stages. I’m editing and rewriting all the time, trying to get it “right” to the best of my ability. I would say that this subtle, complex process in me, which follows me to this day, has its roots in that distant present period.