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My first "official"
collection of short stories, many of which had been previously
published on literary pages in various newspapers and read on national
radio.
Mill-Art ta' Qatt u Qatt
(From Never Never Land)
first appeared in leaflet format in the newspaper
Il-Hajja,
eight pages appearing every day for a number of weeks. A VERY poorly
printed limited edition of the collated leaflets (or flyers) was then
produced with a cover pencilled by long-time friend (fellow comic
collector, painter and now general secretary of an employers union)
Joe "Spider" Farrugia. I inked over his pencils - a system beloved of
the the American superhero comics we both collected avidly at that
time.
"That time" was 1977. The billing on the back was "Rumanzi
il-Hajja
Nru. 36".
Some of the last short stories published here were of the
stream-of-consciousness type that led to the phase of stories
published in Zaghzugh bla
Isem (in fact, two of
these were reprinted in
Zaghzugh). |
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I am not about
to write some eulogy about my writings. It would be reality and not
modesty on my part if I were to say that they don't deserve it. But I
did not want the reader to read what I've written these last three
years without first showing him orher the roads s/he must go through
to get at the end to the meaning of my writing.
There are in total twenty five short stories in this collection which
I chose to call Mill-Art
ta' Qatt u Qatt. And
that is a fitting name, because Peter Pan's "Never Never Land" that J.
M. Barrie created, is specifically the land of dreams. It is there
where you find all you fantasise about. There which is one step away
from the reach of reality. The short stories vary from those very
short ones to those reasonably long ones. The very short ones are
"images", a few selected from a series of situations often symbolic,
but sometimes also realistic, taken from life and showing every time
an individual aspect of it. That life which is both extroverted as
well as introverted, because quite often they analyse some feeling or
other. They are short because in them there is no total development of
a thought, but simply the presentation of a situation. The long short
stories are more elaborate, but I do not feel that there is any reason
why I should explain them here, because whoever reads those well
should understand them with no difficulty.
I love stylistics. I become ecstatic over words and there were times
when I spent half a day over a paragraph until I had the exact choice
of words needed to convey an atmosphere or sensation. So I beg the
reader not to look only at the "story" but also at how it is narrated.
Here too I admit to the influences of modern writers like Joyce and
Woolf, and of contemporary ones like Vonnegut and Bradbury... although
certainly not just those. I really like science fiction and I think
that is what contributed most to my writing.
As I have said somewhere else before, thematically I am mostly in the
rut of the relation or lack of it, between reality and the imagined,
so much so that I am constantly leaping from the enchanted world built
around the fairy tale of my childhood, to breaking my neck against the
solid concrete of the latest cross-way. That is to say, my world is
full of beautiful princesses with golden tresses, with cars sporting
two carbourettors that will tear you to bits if you dare cross their
path, with the joyous song of the harp emanating from the bejeweled
sea born at the bottom of the river of life, and with the old man
living at a corner who has nothing to eat tonight and will die of
hunger.
That is all I can say. About any merits (if there are any) only
someone else can speak. The reader knows what he or she likes. I can
only give you what affects me, and hope that it affects you too.
Gorg Mallia
November, 1977
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