Author Interview: Mario Kluser, part II

Now we come to the second part of this 3-part interview. You may listen to the podcast right here, download this segment or the entire podcast, or read the transcript below. Enjoy!

• mario-kluser-interview-part-2-12-mins
• mario-kluser-interview

Ilaria: After writing your first novel, then you went on to write another one.
Mario: Yes, the first novel was a thriller. It was a thriller that played, like I said, partly in Wall Street. It was about a guy who was working for a big company in Detroit where all the steel factories are, and he was the leader of the IT department. He was a type that was in a midlife crisis, you know, still a bachelor, and underpaid. He felt underpaid, he felt that he wasn’t worshipped enough by his boss, and he had a bad relationship with his boss. And he was thinking about tricking them all out, something like that. But at one point he was contacted by an old friend who had in the meantime a job at Wall Street, where he had all these connections, and this guy was his mentor when he was young in the computer business. And while Jack Acers was working in the steel company, the other guy had made a career on Wall Street, and he was working on the systems on Wall Street so he could do something. And he had figured out a very clever plan how to do it. And now he contacts Jack, after long years, and he got his as an accomplice and together they tricked out the stocks of the firm where Jack Acers was working. And in the meantime they didn’t realize that the boss of Jack Acers was blackmailed by a mafia-like figure. And this man was… he had money, black money and it had to be wiped—I don’t know how you say that.
Ilaria: He had money that he needed to launder.
Mario: Yes. He needed to launder.
Ilaria: Which means that he needed to make dirty money become clean.
Mario: He knew stuff about the boss of Jack Acers, he blackmailed him, and intimidated him, and made him launder the money for him. And Jack Acers and his friend hadn’t a clue that they were in fact not stealing from his boss but stealing from this mafia guy. And then they had to… you can imagine they have to figure out something. And in the end they have a lot to explain.
Ilaria: Okay, so then you wrote your second novel. And did you decide from the beginning that you would self-publish, or did you decide to…
Mario: I decided to self-publish. I didn’t think a minute about sending it to any publisher.
Ilaria: Because the first one had been very successful in the end. So after selling all those books to the public libraries in Holland, did you sell others… is it on Amazon or something like Amazon?
Mario: No. It’s not on Amazon.

Ilaria: So is it possible to order your book somewhere else, or is it just in the libraries?
Mario: Local bookstores have copies and you can order it via my own website, the Dutch website.
Ilaria: Okay, I’ll put the url of that in the interview. [http://mariokluser.nl/boeken/index.html]. Okay. So you wrote your second novel.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria: What’s that about, and how did that all fall into place?
Mario: First I have to say that it’s what we call a literary thriller. Partly because I wanted to make a transition, not to be just another thriller writer, but also to write some kind of other stuff. Fun stuff, when I feel like I want to write fun stuff, and not just be the guy who writes thrillers. Because you get stuck to it, and then if you write ten thrillers everybody expects a thriller. People who are used to reading your books and don’t get a thriller they don’t read you anymore. So I wanted to make a smooth transition to the broader…
Ilaria: …kind of audience.
Mario: And so I wrote Loser – Director’s Cut, it’s an English title of course. The subtitle, “Director’s Cut,” is because – there are a couple of reasons. First because there was no editor who said to me which character I have to change or something. There was even a chapter that was too long, and I knew it was in fact a book in itself. It was too long. And I said, you have to read the book as if you watch some of these Sergio Leone movies. The long, slow shots. You remember, Once Upon a Time in the West, when you look at these guys at the station. But it’s an atmosphere you have to prove [experience]. There are some long shots in the book too, and I would refuse to cut there. And this is one of the reasons why it’s “director’s cut,” but it’s also part of the story because the main character, Andy, he says always to his friend when he was young that he has to live his life on his own terms. That he has to see it like a book or a movie, and that one part of his life is for the public, where he makes some concessions and says, okay, I don’t do this, I do that, because the parents feel better with it and stuff like that. And on the other hand he could live like he wanted, and that’s his director’s cut, so he had to live his life like a director’s cut. The book begins in Detroit prison, but you didn’t ask me that.
Ilaria: No, no, I did. I want to know the story, I want to know about the book.
Mario: Okay. It’s a very long story. The book has nearly 600 pages. And it begins [with] Andy lying on the bed [in] Detroit prison, waiting for his process…
Ilaria: His trial, you mean.
Mario: Oh, yes, his trial. And he already decided for himself that he wants the death sentence. And his lawyer says, you don’t get that sentence in Michigan. Michigan doesn’t have the death sentence for you. And he doesn’t want a lawyer. He’s provoking everybody, he has trouble with everybody. There is not guard… just one guard where he has normal conversation with. And he is just a troublemaker. And he’s sitting on the bed in the beginning and he’s looking at his tattoos, and every time when he looks at a tattoo there is a flashback. So I had this concept always to write one chapter in Detroit prison, one chapter was telling the back story of the tattoo or of the thoughts Andy had at this particular moment. And so it begins, the first memory is when he looks in his armpit and there is the word – I don’t know the English word – it’s a kind of revenge. Like vendetta. If you swear I got this guy even if it costs me a hundred years to find him, I kill him. This is vendetta?
Ilaria: It’s a vendetta, yeah. Having a vendetta against somebody.
Mario: Something like this is in his armpit. His first tattoo, so that nobody could see it. And he’s thinking about what was the reason for this tattoo and then you get the flashback, you get insight into his youth, when he was living alone with his father, they had a bad relationship. His father was always turning [putting] him down. They always had to fight in his youth, later on it went better. Then…
Ilaria: And you told me something very interesting about the timeline of this book, that the past is coming to meet the present. That each one of these flashbacks, you start out from the farthest away, when he was younger.
Mario: Yeah, 25 years away…
Ilaria: And then you move closer and closer to the present time.
Mario: Closer and closer, so that past and present meet and then comes the closure.
Ilaria: The ending, right.
Mario: And the funny thing is, one Dutch interviewer asked me… one blamed me that I didn’t tell the climax of the book in the beginning. That I waited with the climax until the end of the book. And I thought, yeah, you should look for another job if you don’t understand this.
Ilaria: Because the climax should come at the end.
Mario: Yeah, it’s supposed to.
Ilaria: There are writers who put the climax at the beginning and then go back and tell the whole story, but that’s a choice.
Mario: Yeah. I did this with my first book, Het Orderboek. A part of the climax began…
Ilaria: In the beginning.
Mario: It began on a beach where Jack Acers was laying in the sand, dizzy and all, and drunk, and he doesn’t know how he got there, and things like that. And then at a particular point it stops, and then the whole book is one flashback. From chapter 2 it is one year earlier, and then you come to this point on the beach, and then you’ve got your whole climax.
Ilaria: And you understand everything.
Mario: And then you’re on the beach and it goes further. Then you see the end. It makes a loop. But I don’t tell… it’s just like, imagine the movie Titanic begins with the sinking. Okay, after five minutes, okay, we’re done, popcorn, forget about the popcorn.
Ilaria: Yeah, yeah.
*** End of part 2 ***

If you enjoyed this post, this is the perfect time to sign up for free updates via RSS or via email and while you're at it, sign up for our free Newsletter.

Tagged as: Public library, Sergio Leone, Wall Street