I'm interested in how memory and power come together in evil. These are obsessions of mine that appear throughout, like the theme of music. I know at some point or another one of my obsessions will emerge. You don't know how much I save in psychiatrist bills with this writing!

There were many books in my parents' home. I'm from a family of five children and we were all readers. And so by the time I left home, I had already read many books, and I was very interested in reading more. That was when I started to have the desire to write. But it wasn't like a divine apparition with angels and seraphins on high. Not for me, at least.

Everywhere you go you find readers who are interested, even though the story takes place here in this very neighborhood. It doesn't matter that it takes place locally if the intention to make it universal is there. That's what I strive to do.

The reader has information about the characters that the characters themselves don't have. We all have our secret sides. Even I come to understand things about the characters only through the writing process, as I am going along.

Each year, in this world, several languages do die out. There are certain languages that have their survival assured for many years, such as English, but there are other languages whose survival is not so sure, such as Catalan, especially if they don't have a state that protects them. Catalan is spoken in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and Andorra. There are about ten million people who understand it and eight and a half who can speak it. But its future is much less certain than, for example, Danish or Slovenian or Latvian, because they have a state.

Along the way, about certain things, you realize, "I don't know anything about this." You think, "Is this going to sound ridiculous?" So I pestered more than a hundred different people over the course of the book. And when I finished the book I gave it to six or seven trusted readers, who are always the same, but I also gave it to a brother of mine who's a doctor and I asked him to read it, and he was very helpful. It's good to have a group of trusted readers. As my kids have grown up, they've joined this group.

What I strive to do is make my characters seem like real people so that the reader experiences them as people - that's something I've been working on all of my life. I couldn't have written this novel at twenty or thirty, for technical reasons - I didn't have the technique then - but above all because I didn't have the life experiences I have now at sixty-seven.