An American and an Azorean: the magnificent writing of Darrell Kastin

Darrell Kastin was born in Los Angeles, California. His mother, the daughter of Azorean poets and journalists, Francisco and Josefina do Canto e Castro, was born on the island of Faial, in the Azores, Portugal. The family left the Azores at the end of World War II, and has roots on the islands of Terceira, Faial, Pico, S. Jorge and Corvo. Kastin has spent considerable time each of the nine islands, including Santa Maria, his wife’s birthplace, as well as the Portuguese mainland.

He is a novelist, short-story writer, poet, musician and composer, much influenced by Azorean and Portuguese music, history and culture. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The Seattle Review, The Crescent Review, The Blue Mesa Review, The Windsor Review, Confrontation, Gávea-Brown and elsewhere. In Portugal his work has appeared in NEO Magazine, Oficina de Poesia, and Açoriano Oriental.

His first novel The Undiscovered Island was published in 2009 by Tagus Press. Currently out of print, it won the 2010 Independent Publishers IPPY Silver Prize in Multicultural Fiction. His short-story collection, inspired by the myths, legends, and people of the islands, The Conjurer & Other Azorean Tales, was released in December 2012.

As musician and composer, in 2007, he released a CD of original folk-rock songs titled “Lullabies for Sinners”; in 2011, the CD “Mar Português/Portuguese Sea” was released; here, Kastin set the poetry of Fernando Pessoa and Florbela Espanca, to his music. The work features vocals by his daughter Shawna Lenore and maestro Pedro Barroso, one of Portugal’s finest composers and singers, who also produced the CD. It was recorded in Lisbon with some of Portugal’s best musicians, and Kastin on guitar, piano, and background vocals.

Darrell Kastin is also a former bookstore owner. His shop was in San Pedro, California. He is a passionate bibliophile and a supporter of all small and independent booksellers. He currently lives in Sacramento, and is working on several projects, including setting the poetry of Yeats and more Portuguese poetry to music, a musical based on Dracula, and two new novels: a sequel to his first novel titled A Tale of the Azorean Nights, and an historical novel Inês de Castro: Queen after Death.

We invite all our FILAMENTOS readers to read and be ready to be dazzled by the wonderful book: The Conjurer & Other Azorean Tales, as well as The Undiscovered Island.

Praise for The Conjurer & Other Azorean Tales

Kastin (The Undiscovered Island, 2009) uses the landscape and culture of the Azores, his maternal homeland, to marvelous effect in this spellbinding collection of short stories that tend toward folklore and magical realism.

Nine islands off the coast of Portugal are the setting for this debut collection of 18 stories that reach for universality in both meaning and appeal. Each tale chronicles the curious fate of an islander beset by forces of nature, the supernatural, and often family and neighbors. A woman can steal others’ pain; another, after hearing angelic voices in the waves, is swept out to sea only to return alive, though she now grows seasick on solid ground. A dress can win a man’s love. Witch conjurings can carry a fisherman’s boat from its dock to a distant beach, landing him at the feet of his future wife. Even death might not detach men and women from the patterns of life: A skeleton craves and tastes wine, and relationships flourish among the dead. Kastin’s captivating stories are beautifully crafted, transporting readers on these strange journeys. The conflicts and travails have a timeless air; only a few are unambiguously set in modern times, and most could take place at any point in the last few centuries. Each story stands and succeeds alone, yet as a whole, the collection offers a convincing view of life as a fierce adventure, often uncontrollable and always awe-inspiring. In this stellar show of magical realism, the supernatural is accepted as fact by characters who observe or encounter it. For better or worse, it informs and transforms their lives. Readers, too, will be enchanted by its power.

An extremely impressive blend of escapism and portraiture of the human condition, following in the footsteps of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez.

~ The Kirkus Review

The collection of stories presented in The Conjurer & Other Azorean Tales leaves the reader with the delight of being privy to the secrets of the local residents. On these islands, witches borrow boats from unsuspecting fishermen, bones of sailors lost at sea miraculously return years later to comfort lonely widows, and beautiful women feel more connected to the mysterious depths of the sea that surrounds them than to their own families. The dead are never far away and often come back to influence the lives of their spouses or offspring. The stories are captivating and haunting, but also very relatable. Wives nag their husbands too much, children fail to do what their parents want them to do, and natives leave in search of a better life only to find themselves terribly homesick.

For any lover of fairy tales and questioner of life beyond the grave, this compilation is an absolute joy, flawless in both selection and delivery.

~ Samantha Herman, City Book Review

Beyond the beautiful and unexpected images, the narrator has left behind clues of his self, his worlds and his soul, expressing that which only the best literature is able to do: a whole philosophy of life, a whole aesthetic of a different mode of being and existing, the certainty that only love and beauty can save us in the face of the primordial and perpetual chaos that surrounds us. Kastin seems to understand better than most what a literature of identity claims to do and communicate.

~ Vamberto Freitas, Açoriano Oriental

The mysticism that lies within the land draws us to it. The Conjurer & Other Azorean Tales is a collection of short fiction surrounding the Azorean Islands and the island’s certain beauty and majesty, and the wisdom that seems to float about it. Drawing on the naturally supernatural, The Conjurer & Other Azorean Tales is an enticing collection of short fiction, very much recommended reading.

~ The Midwest Book Review

The Conjurer, yes, indeed. This is a rare book in which the title is not only descriptive of one of the characters, but even more appropriately and indelibly describes the author. This collection of tales, rich with mystifying but vivifying paranormal experiences;the kind that generates legends, reminds us again that this author earns close attention — and rewards close attention. Connoisseurs of compelling story-telling will find much to cherish here, including the convincing gift of meticulous observation, and invariably authentic dialogue.

~ JB Kennedy, Easy Reader

Praise for The Undiscovered Island

The Undiscovered Island is the recipient of the 2010 IPPY Independent Publisher’s Award for Multicultural Fiction Adult.

~ Independent Publisher Award

What a wild, big, gorgeous book! Amazing, amazing. Metaphor and myth turn into history and history explodes into human connection…the pages are saturated with such fine sea mist…

~ Katherine Vaz

After Ulysses founded Lisbon as legend has it, he sailed off into forbidden waters and landed on the isle that held the fountain of Purgatory as Dante had it. Might this have been the Azores? The Undiscovered Island could confirm the fact, as all of Portuguese history, so legendary as it is, comes to a kind of culmination on these isles. Time is of no avail as its end and passage convene in this novel in what is a romp of detective story, epic, and family quest. What a great read!

~ Gregory Rabassa, translator of One Hundred Years of Solitude

A story of mystery and magic—magical appearances and mysterious disappearances, mysterious women and magical islands—beautifully and lyrically told.

~ Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

Indeed, I want to be on record as being among the first to recognize this book as a seminal work in 21st Century literature. It is certain to inspire a host of doctoral dissertations. And will be returned to periodically and earnestly by literary critics, as well as language scholars.

~ JB Kennedy, Exerpt from Easy Reader: The South Bay’s Hometown News

A lyrical and exuberantly detailed tale of mystery and mythology intimately linked to the unique history and natural beauty of the Azores.

~ Richard Zimler

THE UNDISCOVERED ISLAND is a uniquely fascinating book: a kind of mystical mystery, rich with the people, the folklore, and the ambiance of the Azores. You don’t know where you’re being led, but you realize quickly — vital in such a novel — that you’re in the hands of a writer who does know, and whom you can trust to get you there both safely and surprisingly, avoiding all cliches, all stereotypes of character and action, all cardboard backgrounds and mashed-potato filler. I would recommend it to anyone — but I’d never lend it, because I’d never get it back. Go get your own.

~ Peter S. Beagle

The Azores is an archipelago hundreds of miles west of the coast of Portugal, located in the mid-Atlantic. It is a relatively unknown (or unexploited) area that is not often discussed in the media-or in literature. This will change, however, if Darrell Kastin and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture has any say. Kastin, who descends from Azores natives, has used his knowledge of the islands, their culture and their history to weave, in The Undiscovered Island, a skillful tapestry of myth, history and personal revelation that is nothing short of fascinating.

The story focuses on Julia Castro, who travels to the Azores from her home in California to seek out her father, who has mysteriously gone missing. Through her search for him, Julia encounters legends and superstitions that pervade the islands, colorful locals, local history and historical fantasy, and the magic of her roots and of herself. What Kastin has done with The Undiscovered Island is bring all of the color and quirk of this beautiful and under-appreciated area to the world’s attention-and we should thank him for that.

~ Ashley Mcall, Sacramento Book Review

Ashlander Darrell Kastin’s new novel, “Undiscovered Island,” uses a mix of reality and magic to explore ancient Portuguese myth in a setting of the seldom-publicized Azores Islands, his ancestral homeland.

The deftly written and attractively packaged 410-page work quickly pulls you into the mysteries of a worried young woman searching for her disappeared father (a writer) amid the strange appearance of a new island in the Azores, which are nine islands some 900 miles away from their mother country of Portugal.

~ John Darling, Ashland Daily Tidings

In 2009, I have reviewed… The Undiscovered Island by Darrell Kastin… (and) am heartened to see that mine has not been the only review of this remarkable book and that its Amazon ranking throughout December has been healthy. The Undiscovered Island deserves all of this and more, for it is a book of wonders—a family saga, a chronicle of Portuguese history as it was and should have been, a scholarly text, a Quixotic quest, and a beguiling mystery. Whether or not the novel is a fantasy, I cannot say, because its poetic, dream-like plot melds the ordinary and the extraordinary so seamlessly, believably, and, dare I say, realistically that ‘fantastical’ seems like not only an unimaginative descriptor but also an inaccurate one.

~ JoSelle Vanderhooft, The Pedestal Magazine

The author’s Website

http://www.darrellkastin.com/index.html