Back in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Mario 'Il-Mulej' Azzopardi was acknowledged as the enfant terrible of Maltese literature. His poems had a rage-against-the-machine fury about them.
The thing he wanted most was to change the world, not least the archaic little drama he was born into and into whose hands he played for a while.
This deemed it a mortal sin to vote Labour even as Bob Dylan sang The Times They Are a-Changin'. Yeah right.
One would be pardoned for writing off the long hair and incendiary verses as the antics of an angry young man.
Until, that is, one reads his latest book. Published a few weeks ago, L-Aħħar Ġranet ta' Ciorni (Ciorni's last days) is on the face of it a sweet little collection of stories and snippets that are not without their share of fun.
This, however, is no ordinary humour. It is a lump-in-throat laughter of one who has given up on a straightforward project for a better world.
I find it tremendously relevant in the sense that it gives us a glimpse into what one of Malta's leading intellectuals is brooding over. It turns out Il-Mulej is still very angry - so much so that he can see the funny side.
The title story's about a cat called Ciorni (which is apparently Russian for 'black'). Barely two pages long, it's also one of the best things I've read in a while. Ciorni happens to be on its last of nine lives. In the cat's multi-segmented lifeline Azzopardi sees a reflection of the species' colourful history, from fodder for Egyptian mummies to witches' familiar.
The death of Ciorni leaves a void in our angry narrator's life, for it is only through looking into the cat's eyes that he can transcend the mediocrity of the present. It is to Ciorni that our angry author turns for relief - to 'forget', as he puts it.
Three things in particular are worth forgetting. One is the banalisation of the media - not surprising Azzopardi should single this one out, given his long-running critical contributions on the subject in a local newspaper.
The first story tells of a 'reality' television episode that involves multiple cosmetic surgery, and that goes horribly wrong when actual reality intrudes.
I wish I could disagree with Azzopardi. Having just watched half an hour of a programme which involves endless footage of a bunch of whoevers twiddling their thumbs on Comino, I can't.
The tragedy is that pluralisation, which initially promised great things, has ended in a morass of plagiarised formats and mindless content. Try saying that at the Malta Television Awards.
Equally nauseating to Azzopardi is the escalation of rhetoric we've witnessed during this last decade or so.
No prizes for deciphering the mimicry in his third story, 'Micro-Systems City'. In it he narrates how a new IT project that comes amid a blitz of publicity, ends up making automatons of its workers. They actually lose their humanity.
Azzopardi's real target is not IT - that would be a simple old-fashioned aversion to new technology. Rather, he attacks the rhetorical assault that launches the project nationally.
He makes mincemeat of the various pseudish phrases ('experts at innovative programmes', 'increase dramatically the notion of space and time', and such) and of the complicity of media people more eager to plant a finger in the pie than anything else.
Azzopardi's third target is social injustice. 'Jean-Maħmud Kaghame' is an immigrant who hangs himself while in detention.
Marginalised and forgotten in life, he becomes something of a celebrity in death by virtue of the fact that he is found to be wearing both a cross and a crescent.
This is Azzopardi at his most biting. It's dreadful to think what the prefix 'ir-' makes us do to people.
Even as we indulge in the annual philanthropic potlatch, there are corpses washing up on our shores and hundreds of men and women cooped up in sub-human conditions in the camps, themselves hidden away ever so carefully behind walls and overgrown fences.
Reading the story reminded me of the many young people who lost their lives trying to flee to better prospects in West Berlin.
It all looks so pathetic and useless now that all that remains is a paved line where the wall once stood.
I wonder if we will ever see, in our lifetime, tourists taking pictures of rusty barbed wire down in Ħal Far. Then we may turn to our angry authors.
If our censors had some sense they'd probably ban L-aħħar ġranet ta' Ciorni.
I doubt they will, for they seem obsessed with the perceived vulgarity of content and little else.
Save for a few liberties here and there, Azzopardi's work is as harmless and 'respectable' as it gets. Which makes the cat among the pigeons even more lethal.
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