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This booklet of
experimental, stream of consciousness short stories was self-published
in 1985.
I claim no literary worth for them, but they do seem to have caught
the eye of some of Malta's best literary critics and academics, and
have been analysed for the use of descriptive language. One of the
stories, "Hajtu: Storja ta' l-Imhabba" ("His life: A love story") was
also reproduced in the definitive three volume collection of Maltese
short stories edited by Dr. Charles Briffa and published by Agius and
Agius Ltd. In his study of the Maltese short story in
In-Novella Maltija,
PIN, 1999), Dr. Briffa calls each of these stories a "psychological
painting".
The last story in the book translated into English can be found
here.
The book closes with a few words from me. This is their translation::
These short stories could
easily be called poems, or essays... because how can one distinguish
one form from the other, when the artististic inspiration is the same?
It's even a pity that this book is too small to include more than two
illustrations with it, and a cover - because I believe in the
universal totality of the artistic pull, even if by necessity, the
medium needs to be different.
The writings here are a selection of what I wrote between 1976 and
1983 - in other words from when I was eighteen (stunned by the
introduction at university of Joyce, Woolfe, Lawrence...) until I was
twenty five (and the
auctorite
and the
experience
had got mixed in such a way that it
was difficult for me to choose one from the other).
The continuous preoccupation in these writings is with the hair that
separates illusion from reality. They are the poetic and
impressionistic interpretation (and I was very style-conscious as I
wrote them) of the psyche of an individual who is a composite
character and who goes through experiences of the type that many
people go through. There is a bit of me in this individual, but only a
little bit - the rest of the character is made up of the psychological
building blocks of people I know, that I have loved or hated, of
people I have read about, or that I have experienced inside me from
afar or close by.
And now I have shared these writings with you so that you too can live
them. I hope it has been a stimulating experience.
June, 1985 |
