What are your favorite TV shows? I like mystery stories or detective stories with interesting characters, for example The Mentalist. I love historical, period series too, like adaptations of novels by classic authors. I also enjoy documentaries about Nature, history, classical music, opera, ballet and composers’ lives.
What is your favorite meal? Prawns cooked in any way, especially in tomato sauce with garlic and rice.
Is there a writer you idolize? If so who? I admire many writers but I don’t idolise any of them. Present day author I greatly admire is Cay Rademacher. From the past, Victor Hugo and Jane Austen.
How did you come up for the title of this book? The novel’s plot is set against the background of ballet and it is a celebration of ballet. So, the title had to be something pretty, catchy and related to the art. ARABESQUE is a step in classic ballet, one of the most beautiful, striking and elegant therefore I thought it was appropriate. The drawing of a dancer on the centre of the cover shows him executing an arabesque.
What group did you hang out with in high school? I grew up in Portugal and the schools were not called high schools. I think that may be an American term. Anyway, at the time there was a so-called grammar school for people who wanted to go to University and do a degree and a secondary school for people who were more interested in pursuing a medium diploma or a profession, for example if they wanted to become an electrician, a cook, etc. I never had a group I hung out with at school. I had some really good friends and got along with others that weren’t close friends but were okay.
What are you passionate about these days? I’m passionate about the same things I always was: writing, reading, classical music, opera, ballet, history and travelling. I like to be informed and I am interested in politics. I find rather worrying the generic turn to the extreme right-wing parties and politicians that we are witnessing in many countries around the world. Having grown up under a fascist dictatorship in Portugal that lasted 48 years and fell when I was fifteen, I understand the value of democracy and freedom and it pains me to see the lack of awareness in many younger people who didn’t live through such an experience.
If you had to do your journey to getting published all over again, what would you do differently? I’m not sure I would do anything differently. I’m happy with what I’ve achieved and where I am right now.
E-book or print? And why? I think there is space for both. Print books have a different feeling. You can touch the paper, smell it and you can make a print book look beautiful. You can’t really do the same with an e-book, however, the easiness of buying e-books from all over the world and having them within minutes in your reader is a wonderful thing, as is the space it saves you and the practicality of taking many books with you when you travel without having to worry about weight and space in your bags. I read in both formats. I love my kindle for the reasons stated about e-books but I love print books too. If I buy reference books for research I prefer them in print format. It’s easier to consult several at the same time, look at pages and take notes.
What is your favorite scene in this book? I have various in this book but to name just two, I’d say 1) it’s the scene when Amadeus attempts to escape East Germany with his daughter in the early 1970s because of the emotional punch, tension and intensity. And 2) the scene where the two modern day principals (lead characters Karsten and Ivone) are rehearsing for the ballet Don Quixote because it shows the commitment, the difficulty, the passion and the beauty of it all.
ARABESQUE
Author: MG da Mota
GENRE: historical psychological drama
A woman living alone in a coastal Sussex town in 1998 plants a copper beech sapling at 3 a.m. on a dark, cold night. Why?
A ballet dancer in 1960s East Germany is oppressed, longs for escaping with his little daughter but not his wife. Why? Will he make it?
In 2022 Karsten von Stein, widower and principal of the Royal Ballet, with two young children, meets Ivone Benjamim, a Portuguese, newly-arrived principal dancer. They discover a magical chemistry when dancing and soon it transfers to their private lives.
Against the background of ballet and its dancers, a woman called Grace tells her story from a rehab centre. Obsessive, delusional she begins believing Ivone robbed her of the man of her dreams—Karsten. And then a skeleton is found in a garden...What connects all these people and their stories?
You’ll
be the audience facing the stage of this balletic novel.
Prologue
Southeast
England, late November 1998
She looks out
of the window. Dark night. Black but clear. Twinkling dots punctuate the raven
velvet of the sky. Stars shimmer cold and icy. Their light slightly wavering.
She knows it is the Earth’s atmosphere. But that’s neither here nor there. It
doesn’t matter a jot. Not at this moment anyway.
Darkness is the
important thing. No moon. New moon. Why do people refer to a new moon when
there is no moon or when one cannot see the moon from our revolving, ever
turning blue dot? The moon is still up there in the sky. It’s just that at some
point during its orbit its farther side from us is facing the sun. So the side
facing us is dark and we can’t see it. As simple as that.
Tonight is new
moon. An ideal night. She opens the window quietly and glances at the houses to
her right first, then to her left. Like hers they are all immersed in silent
darkness. People sleep. She looks at the luminous hands of her alarm clock on
the side table. The shorter hand points at the number three, or close to it,
and the long hand at somewhere between ten and fifteen. Probably around 3:12 in
the morning. Her house stands almost but not quite alone on top of the hill. To
her right, looking from her bedroom window that faces the back garden, there
are two houses. The one closest to hers is empty.
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Website: https://www.flowingprose.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/m.g.da.mota
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margarida-mota-bull/
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/mgdamota/
5 comments:
Thank you so much for featuring ARABESQUE today.
As the author of Arabesque I'd like to thank you for featuring my book and an interview with me today. Thank you.
Im looking forward to reading this book. Thanks for sharing.
This looks like a very good book.
Sounds fabulous
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