Sonia Faleiro in the Press

If you are a journalist and would like further information, or would like to arrange an interview with the author, please mail press@soniafaleiro.com

Mumbai Mirror , August 5, 2006

Peek-a-Boo!

The author confesses her fondness for horror films, murder mysteries
and ghost readers, to Kenneth Lobo
Childhood anecdote...
When I was about eight years old, we watched an Agatha Christie TV series
that left me terrified. After that, for the longest time, I'd picture myself sitting
on a vast bed, waiting for someone to climb down a chimney and kill me.
Describe a scene by the sea.
I've grown up by the sea, in North Goa. I finished writing The Girl, while alone
in a beach house. I'm a light sleeper and the sound of the sea was so loud, I
was soon spooked and moved out.
Does writing take an emotional toll on you?
I'm rather cheerful most of the time. But there's an accident scene in the novel
that I had to research—details like how much time it takes to die. That was painful.
Writers feel most vulnerable when…
(Laughs) When they read their own work and realise they have a long way to go.
Why are you interested in the new wave of Japanese horror films?
With movies like The Ring, what are the chances of a girl jumping out from the screen? But in the new wave of horror films, the setting is more urban and identifiable.
You like leaving your characters nameless…
I can never think of an appropriate name! Should I call her Preeti or Deborah? However, after deciding not to do it again, I went ahead and did the same thing in my short story, Stupid!
Challenges you encounter while writing.
It's very important to write daily, for long periods of time. This regularity is stressful.
You left out a two-page love-scene, thinking of your father reading it…
(Sighs) Oh, the family—it's like a ghost on your shoulder! But I judged him wrongly—he would have been charmed to read his daughter's talent in writing that.
What was the impact of losing your mother to an accident?
The trauma of losing a loved one is always the same. The intensity never lessens. The worst thing is remembering her birthday or death anniversary late. It's also a blessing, as it shows you're moving on.
A song that never leaves your head.
As children, we slept to Portuguese songs, like Maman Eu Quero. You rarely hear them today.
You love travelling. your fave stop?
Japan. Its contemporary culture and history, which I studied in college, are engrossing.

The Hindustan Times, July 23, 2006

Just Below the Surface

"Author Sonia Faleiro's newly released short story, Stupid, is as macabre as her first book, The Girl.

It's hard to imagine that there can be so much darkness and melancholy in the writing of someone so cheerful. That’s the thought that keeps racing through my head as I watch this tiny person sitting in front of me, with her carefully painted pink lip gloss and spring-coil bronze curls cascading down her diminutive shoulders. Author Sonia Faleiro is 28, but plumbs the murky underbelly of human nature with an ease often ascribed to someone older and more jaded.

Her first book released earlier this year, The Girl, published by Penguin, was set in a dazzlingly different Goa, safe from the trespassing eyes of tourists in a tiny village by the sea. The village’s name, Azul, the Portuguese name for blue, could be evocative of azure seas and balmy beaches, but instead, very quickly, the reader finds himself in a Village of the Dead, where there is a Sad Café and an unnamed protagonist called the Girl, whose life is a vortex of loneliness.

Faleiro has already followed this poignant book with a short story, Stupid, in First Proof II: the Penguin Book of New Writing from India, that just hit the stands. This is a startling, gut-wrenching story told from the perspective of a young child who watches her father violently brutalise her mother. Faleiro tells the story relentlessly and with the calm and precision of a surgeon cutting open a patient.

Born to a politician father and a mother who was a professor of Portuguese, Faleiro spent her early childhood in Goa, before her father’s political ambitions took them to Delhi. “It was a city I never enjoyed,” she says, adding, “Delhi was full of cliques and, till the bitter end, I couldn’t figure out which one I belonged to.” It was also here, where she lost her mother, Muriel, in a car accident when she was 16. “She was a tremendous writer and very reassuring to be around. The great tragedy about loss is that memories die or fade away unless they are talked about and you end up forgetting pivotal incidents of your life that have influenced you greatly,” she says reflectively, giving you the first glimpse of where the recurring themes of death and pain in her work stem from.

Faleiro finished her undergraduate studies in History at St Stephens College and went on to do her Masters in literature in Edinburgh, Scotland. This is really where her first novel was born. “I was separated from things I loved and longed for--home, family, Goa--and was spending long hours in a library writing my thesis,” she says, by way of explaining what set the tone of the book. The Girl is infused with this sense of distance and just as Faleiro is transplanted into an alien environment, the protagonist of the book is abandoned by her lover.

“I plagiarise freely from my own life,” laughs Faleiro and says she set the novel in Goa, because, it would be dishonest to set it anywhere else. “There are certain Goan traditions of passing on memories and culture that I love. I understand that society, that milieu and culture best.” The book has received a lot of bouquets and Ravi Singh, Publisher of Penguin, says it’s one of the strongest debuts this year. “Faleiro’s language has a certain intensity, it is precise and poetic, without an extra word in a paragraph.” He also sees her as a long-distance runner, rather than a flash-in-the-pan. Elise Capron, her American agent, who also represents Amy Tan, is equally enthusiastic. “We were truly excited by The Girl. Sonia writes with such a fresh narrative voice and the book is rich and poetic. We were amazed at her talent, especially for such a young writer and are thrilled to have the privilege of bringing her out to an American audience.” Capron adds that they were even more enthusiastic when they found that Faleiro is also a talented non-fiction writer.

Despite being a prolific freelancer who has written for Tehelka and The Indian Express, Faleiro was taken aback by the writing process. “Writing a novel is insanely difficult and doesn’t come easily,” she groans. “It’s painstaking and requires lots of discipline.” So, most mornings, she is up as early as 4 or 5 am and begins writing then. “By 12 pm I’m spent.” After which, she spends her afternoons indulging her love for the gruesome. “I adore gory films like The Grudge, The Ring and My Little Eye and am riveted by Japanese horror films, she says.” She, especially, enjoys the new genre of sophisticated horror films with its element of realism. “It’s the fact that it could happen to you that gets me.” When she rattles off her favorite authors (Alice Seabold, Donna Tart, Amy Tan), they have one thing in common. They all tend to court the macabre and have a disturbing undercurrent lurking below the surface of the narrative.

“But, that’s the nature of the life you live, especially in the city,” she protests. “All lightness and smiles above and dramatic and difficult underneath.”

Rukhmini Punoose.

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Verve, March - April 2006

A Way with Words

Savouring the success of her recent release, The Girl, debutante novelist, Sonia Faleiro, recalls a childhood filled with books.

Afternoon, February 26, 2006

"Azul is a composite of various villages I have visited in Goa," explained author Sonia Faleiro, about her debut novel."

Read the full interview.

Herald, February 26, 2006

Sonia Faleiro creates for us a vivid world of loneliness, rejection and indifference ... We get involved in a gripping story that unfolds in bright sharp colours and emotive images that live in the mind--sometimes unpleasant and often juiced for their vividness and pathos, but always fresh, adventurous, powerful, gripping and reflecting the inner turmoil. ...The time shifts and narrative changes are subtly woven together into a seamless story that holds our attention throughout with its easy flow and bite. Art lies in concealing art. For lovers of well written and subtly constructed novels, this is a treasure house to explore. A must read for senior students of literature.

DNA, February 10, 2006

"I didn't set out to write a melancholic book," says Sonia Faleiro.

Read the full interview.

Society, February, 2006

Reccomended Reading: Sonia Faleiro's maiden novel, The Girl follows the protagonist's two lovers who are unable to understand the reasons that compelled her to surrender to the sea. Excellently scripted, this Penguin offering comes at Rs 250. A treat to read, indeed.

Time Out, February 10-23, 2006

A somber, sinuously wrought tale (...) The novel is highly descriptive of the sea, the landscape, the rains, and a general atmosphere of loss and trauma. Faleiro does not clutter the narrative with too many characters and the few prominent ones orbiting the central figures (...) are all well delineated.

Though Goa has been used as part locale in a few novels (...) very few Goans themselves have written successful novels in English from within the place. This is an inexplicable lacuna from a land with a singular history and which has far more to offer than fun, frolic, and feni. In fact, only one other novel, Tivolem by Victor Rangel-Ribeiro comes to mind. And now there is The Girl by Sonia Faleiro.

Review not available online.

Goan Observer, February 6, 2006

A Funereal Song

(...) Faleiro has captured the cloistered frog’s pond society of village life with perfect poignancy. (...) Faleiro, who hails from Goa, writes with lyricism and sensitivity and offers a heart-wrenchingly vivid portrait of Goan village society (...)

This is a Goa true blue Goans will recognize and weep for!(...)

The Girl is a funereal, lyrical, haunting read, one every Goan must read.

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The Times of India, January 28, 2006

Read My Lips: Gregory David Roberts

(...) I recently read The Girl by Sonia Faleiro, which I enjoyed for its courage in the writer's decision to move with complexity and grace between times, places, and authorial voices. (...)

India Today, January 28, 2006

Lovelorn in Goa

The Girl is unabashedly sentimental. The heartscape of the two central characters is subject enough for the author, which is refreshing given the almost obligatory political/social commentary in Indian English fiction these days. (...)

Rife with wildly extended metaphors and a curious, if slightly forced, "air of mystery", you will probably lose interest in How-The-Girl-Came-To-Be-Dead (the ostensible plot), your attention shifting instead to the real treat of this book: the dazzling and often strangely dark visual imagery. (...) what really engages here is the gloomy, monsoon-drenched richness in the descriptions of Goa, its Portuguese Catholic ethos, and most of all, the turns of phrase (...)

Though it may seem sentimentally overblown, The Girl works because it is above all, a candid expression of a universally tortuous human experience-lopsided love. (...)

The Girl is a slip of a book, just over a hundred pages long, no more than one evening's read and in the tradition of Elizabeth Smart's cult classic By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, it makes romantic suffering something of epic proportions. A good, swift journey for those who care to venture back to that painful place (left behind in adolescence by most practical people) where one can actually die from too much love.

The Indian Express, January 22, 2006

Death and the Maiden

Sonia Faleiro’s debut novel explores the lonely corners of loneliness. Not an urban loneliness but a more inevitable and universal one that can unsettle anyone, anywhere. (...)

[The] novel explores the everyday Goa, one that's not included in the bouncy 'Go Goa' invitation. It's a narrative of simple complex lives in places that are not on perpetual holidays. Places of incredible beauty but for many, a haunted beauty. (...)

It’s this twisted reality that lends The Girl its poignant moments and makes it so readable.

Tehelka, January 21, 2006

Love Shared, Love Lost

Tenderly written, Sonia Faleiro 's debut novel is set in the town of Azul. In this extract, the two men who loved the Girl discover her diary. It confronts them with a tale of love, betrayal and loneliness.
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