Interview with literary novelist Jani Anttola

Literary novelist Jani Anttola joins me today to chat about his new novel, Father of One.

During his virtual book tour, Jani will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly chosen participant. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit his other tour stops and enter there, too!

Bio:
Jani Anttola is a Finnish novelist and a medical doctor. In the 1990s he served in Rwanda with the French military and fought in Bosnia as a soldier of the Bosnian army. His works have been published in the UK and Finland. He has spent most of his adult life abroad, working in Africa, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific.

Welcome, Jani. Please tell us about your new release.
It’s a novel set in Bosnia during the war in the 1990s. It’s about a man who tries to escape a besieged town and to reunite with his wife and his infant son. It’s based on a true story.

How long did it take you to write this book?
I often do just 500-600 words per day, and that’s when and if I write. The word count of Father of One is around 90,000. So it was about 180 days of writing, spread over a year. Some might call it a snail’s pace, but when I’m not rushing, the editing and re-writing phase gets a lot easier. That took another year.

Excerpt from Father of One:
The old man they called Dedo died in September after a two-day storm. The wind blew from the south, bringing sea clouds, grey and ragged like used steel wool, that poured down on the valley and the gusts drove rain against the window planks, making them wet and dripping, with pooling water on the floor of the cell. Outside the camp the trees bent in the heavy wind and the hayfields were flat in the rain. It was a summer storm but it wasn’t warm: the police stayed holed up in their house and grey smoke puffed from the stovepipe and was ripped away flatly in the wind. The cops had reduced their perimeter to a few that huddled in the far corners. In their olive-green ponchos the guards looked like some strange, dark-glistening mushrooms behind the rain. Then, after the storm broke, the drizzle continued for a day and the hills were deep green and misty, and the rusty old silos of the batching factory stood out brightly in their crumbling yellow paint. There were pools of water on the paths between the barracks and tree branches blown across the yard and everything was washed out, fresh and silent.

That afternoon they were corralled into the third barrack. The hundreds of inmates stood waiting, packed in the hall now, happily surprised by the announcement of an additional tea portion. The previous police crew had repurposed the building as a prison canteen. On the low counter the inmates had built, a gas stove was alight. On its grate sat a fifty-litre, boiling aluminium kettle. Maka stood behind the cauldron with another inmate, a ladle in hand, feeling the heat from the little blue flames that flickered underneath.

Say your publisher has offered to fly you anywhere in the world to do research on an upcoming book, where would you most likely want to go?
To my kitchen, to make some coffee. Because I’d just woken up from a dream.

Who is your favorite author and why?
I can’t pick anyone specifically – I have a long list of authors I enjoy reading. Most of them are from the early to mid-20^th century. Steinbeck, Kawabata, Sartre and others. They lived through a period of calamities and turmoil, saw the world change, and that shaped their thinking and writing. It was an era when the emphasis was on good storytelling and the writing craft. Also, reading an author from those past times isn’t unlike stepping into a time machine. The period comes through in authentic detail.

What was the scariest moment of your life?
Something in the war in Bosnia. I was in an infantry unit that took a lot of casualties. Most of our fighters who didn’t get killed were wounded at some point. It’s just moronic business. I feel bad for all the people, especially children, who still have to go through that in all these pointless wars going on.

Links:
Website | Amazon UK | Amazon | BookGuild

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