Scenes from a disappearing Malta

Author: Joe Camilleri Publisher: Horizons / 2020 Pages: 323pp

The author is an up-andcoming author from Gozo who has already given us three collections of short stories before the present volume – Solitudni fil-Folla (2007), Fir-Rokna tasSilenzju (2008) and Żwiemel tarRiħ (2010).

Television viewers of the Gozo weekly programme Ghawdex Illum know him as a regular contributor on items to do with art and Gozo as do those who used to attend, before COVID, cultural events in Gozo.

He taught Maltese at secondary level and History of Art at Sixth Form.

The present volume, much like those preceding it, presents scenes from a Malta (mostly Gozo) that is disappearing and changing beyond recognition.

It chronicles the changes without falling into maudlin sentimentality or useless recrimination.

Perhaps the best example is the last short story, Żerriegha talĦarrub, in which a Gozitan migrant in Australia comes back to Gozo after many years. He is bewildered by the many changes he finds but then finds himself drawn back to his family and its whispered tales of the changes in the personal lives of people they know as well as by the rites of the annual village festa, though he has sloughed off religious practice.

Maskri presents us with two contrasting migrants – one a migrant who was shipwrecked and spent days on the run, pursued by farmers and police, and various Russian, Ukrainian women imported and farmed out by Maltese “entrepreneurs”.

The short story I liked best is Ftajjar tal-makku, which brought back to my memory the Rabat Gozo of my childhood around the San Gorg church. It is a simple tale of an altar boy and his dog which gets run over by a construction company’s big truck.

It is told in simple language with some vernacular or dialect thrown in.

Other short stories well worth reading are Żjara, Ħsad ir-riefnu and Gawwija bajda u ħamra.

In more than one story the author plays with the reader for he begins moving in one direction before setting off at a tangent with the story proper beginning then. Scenes from married life tell many times of a relationship gone sour and cold, or of spinsters living a life of hardship and solitude without understanding why they had to end like that. Or scenes taken from the divorce courts.