The most vital struggle

DUENDE

Author: Lizzie Eldridge Publisher: Night Publishing Year: 2011 Pages: 484

I consider this book as one of the more significant books to have been published in Malta in recent years.

Lizzie Eldridge was born in Glasgow but she now lives in Malta where she teaches English as a foreign language, apart from being an actor, theatre director and writer.

She has recently said, with a photo as evidence, that she has been ‘giving the finger’ ever since she was two. She is now very involved with political activism in the wake of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder and indeed some of her comments on her blog are even more trenchant than anything Daphne wrote, and that’s saying something.

One wonders what she may write when she comes around to write a novel with a Malta background especially in times as these.

This book is a veritable ‘tour de force’ – it focuses on the preCivil War Spain. It also tells the touching story of two male lovers – Najo, the artist, and Jose the philosophy lecturer ever since they realized they were in love when they were just 15 at a church school.

Love between them flourished despite the pressures from the priests at the school and despite the pressures by the surrounding Catholic environment. They are born in Barcelona but they soon move to Madrid and live with Jose’s uncle Salvador. Their mutual love strengthens their resolve to remain together.

Their families prove to be very supportive and shelter them from outside interference.

Then the boys grow up and take up their respective roles. Najo, the artist, becomes a famous artist. We follow him in the way he creates successive paintings which reflect on how he sees life around him.

Jose, who is older, focuses on philosophy first as a reader and student and later as a lecturer in philosophy.

Meanwhile we get a whole education on the most important philosophical writers from Plato to Nietzsche through Schopenhauer and Freud. These are not just names but schools of thought.

Through Jose, Najo gets interested in the various schools of thought.

Then the two of them meet the literary and artistic luminaries of their time – Federico Garcia Lorca the dramatist above all, and Salvador Dali, Ortega y Gasset, and even Georges Bataille.

The two grow enriched by these friendships and also by what they witness, especially the death of the matador at a corrida.

Meanwhile they live through what is happening around them in Spain. With hindsight we know they are living the years immediately preceding the Civil War but they obviously do not know this. What they know are the numerous outbursts of violence and mutual killing such as during the Setmana Tragica or the repeated massacres in outlying towns.

And through everything they learn about that Spanish word which is quite untranslatable – Duende. That most vital struggle when touching death is knowing, and truly knowing, life.

“Duende. Mysterious and inexplicable like Goethe’s notion of the Demonic. Duende, that mischievous spirit in myth and folklore. Duende. Something primal, living, shuddering and vibrant. Duende which evokes tears through its music and its poetry. Duende which comes from the depths of the body through the roots of the earth and shakes the entire universe. The aspiration to perfection is a struggle with the duende.”

The very appropriate cover is the painting The Divide of Reason by Damian Ebejer.