First steps of boyhood

‘In-Nar ghandu isem Noti minn pagna intima’

Author: Gioele Galea Publisher: Horizons / 2020 Pages: 211

This is not the first appearance of the author in print. Last year, he was named as The Best Emergent Writer by the National Book Council for his book Thabbat xtaqtek.

In a way, one could say the present book is related to that as a sort of prequel. In other words, it was published later but represents a period in the author’s life that came before.

It is important to note that the author is a priest and his first book is a sort of autobiographical account of the time he spent in solitude at St Jerome Hermitage in Pescalupo in Italy.

There he yearned for and hungered for the Divine, the Ineffable, the Absolute. The way was not easy for him but he struggled on.

It has been remarked by others that his brand of mysticism is not religious in the formal sense of the word.

That book, we might say, represents the author in his maturity.

This book describes the author in his boyhood years where the maturity he describes in his first book had yet to be achieved.

The book ends with the protagonist at around 15 years of age so there could be space for a further book to illustrate the next stage in his path of life.

The boy so portrayed is a highly strung boy growing up in what looks like a lower middle class Maltese family with the father a festa aficionado, an inveterate lotto player who never wins and the mother an overworked, protective person.

The boy shuns people, even school colleagues, and finds solace in his own room.

People speak of him as naturally predisposed to become a priest but there is no trace of religiosity in his thoughts, certainly not the festa religiosity of his father.

On the contrary he was a victim of a paedophile attempt in an empty church.

Knowing as we know that he later became a priest, what happened between the end of this book and the one we mentioned at the beginning is nothing short of miraculous. For the growing boy, maybe because of his physical disability, is a born rebel, cannot understand the religion as practised by his immediate family and has been brought up to be afraid of a vengeful god.

His anger clouds his mind and he withdraws into himself; shunning everyone, those of his immediate family and also acquaintances or school colleagues.

Another title of this book could well be “The Un-understood”. There do exist people like that and this book gives a good description of such.