Adult
Castillo
When Amanda’s father dies, she feels compelled to visit Emma, the mother who abandoned her when she was still a child. Now with a family of her own, it feels urgent to Amanda that she investigate the silence surrounding her mother leaving, but also the death of her mother’s twin sister Cathy, a.k.a. K. Penza, the cult author of the Inspector Castillo crime novels, who was killed by a bomb during the violent and murky political climate of Malta in the 1980s.
Clare Azzopardi’s meta-detective novel irresistibly weaves the sleuthing of Amanda and Inspector Castillo, inviting the reader to unmask the real Cathy, Catherine, Kitty, K. Penza. This novel is many things, but at its root is a desire to express the ever-relevant – and now sadly ever-topical – helplessness we feel when faced with endemic corruption and apparently sanctified violence [ . . . ]
-Teodor Reljic
Clare Azzopardi's Castillo is as complex as each individual reader may make of a writerly novel. Not only its themes, but also plot lines sometimes overlap in a way that might make it appear fragmentary to some, but amazingly skilful to others. It may be approached from various angles - its plot's schema, its psychological portrayal and relationships, of mainly familial characters, its study of motherhood, the correlation between Cathy's stories and the background and timespan the novel is set in, etc.
-Maria Grech Ganado
Castillo was published in English by Praspar Press (trans. Albert Gatt); in Arabic by El Maraya (trans. Abdelrehim Youssef); in Italian by Mesogea (trans. Virginia Monteforte). It was also made into a play and a full-length film by Take Two.
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“Castillo” — The Habit of Silence
Silence is a foreign language. We all speak it but it’s so hard to explain.
Imagine sitting next to a loved one, on a bench on top of the world, overlooking fields and trees and sporadic buildings, with a faint glimpse of the sea far, far away, and not saying a single word. Not because you don’t have anything to talk about but because you don’t have to.
Now imagine the self-same scenario, but remove the loved one and replace him or her with someone else, someone whose silence is filled with reticence, reluctance, secrecy. That quiet eloquence immediately dissolves into a murky puddle of ambiguity, confounding you as to what constitutes an appropriate response: fight or flight? Speak up or respond in kind?
Amanda, the main character in *Castillo*, Clare Azzopardi’s debut novel for adults, finds herself faced with such a conundrum. Having been abandoned by her mother as a little girl, she was then left under the care of her father, whose taciturnity about matters concerning his wife further compounded the confusion. Now, married and with a young daughter, Amanda goes on a quest to find out what she can about her deceased aunt, novelist Cathy Penza, her mother’s twin sister.
Many of the characters in *Castillo*make it a habit of living in silence. There are long dialogues in the novel which tell us exactly nothing, a barrage of tos and fros that lead exactly nowhere. This is extremely frustrating for Amanda because she is confronted at every turn with an impenetrable wall of silence. She looks for people who do not want to be found, people who do not want to speak to her, and this prompts her to look for meaning (and answers) in spaces that lie outside of speech.
Interview at the MMLF
Claudia Gauci interviews Clare Azzopardi at the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, 2018