Gino Lombardi: L-Aħħar Bewsa, self-published, 2010, 417 pp.
There are many ways a book can rub me the wrong way. The first is by having a whole section dedicated to book reviews of the author’s previous books at the very beginning. The second is by having a certified psychologist tell me how psychologically accurate the characters depicted are. Gino Lombardi’s L-Aħħar Bewsa (The Last Kiss) has both. It was clear before I had read the first chapter that we were off to a bad start.
Still, it is unfair to judge a book by its preface, so I valiantly carried on. Within the first few chapters (and the book has 98 chapters), it was evident that the book was going to develop on three narratives. The first deals with a woman abandoning her family after she bumps into an old boyfriend.
The second is a series of incidents and clashes within a construction company after they accidentally discover an archaeological site. The third deals with an archaeological student who gets involved in this discovery.
Now I am not against cross-genre literature, but I do expect a certain consistency in the narrative. For starters the narration shifts awkwardly from first person to third person without any really dramatic purpose.
Secondly, the three narratives turn into separate sub-genres in their own right. The first turns into a melodramatic soap-opera, the second into a police drama, and the third into a weak supernatural adventure story.
For most of the book, these narratives alternate with annoying regularity and do not really come together until very late in the book. I am in no doubt that the author researched his situations well, but the novel lacks a uniform vision that fuses everything together.
Moreover, 400 pages worth of text need slightly more intriguing plots. Halfway through the book I could already guess the ending. By the time I had read three quarters of it, I knew it.
Having a book’s characters certified by a psychologist is off-putting. It’s like having a nutritionist tell you what’s inside a Mars bar. They could be right, but it takes away all the fun.
Quite honestly, I don’t read books because the characters are ‘psychologically correct’, but because they are human. The author strives so hard to create ‘correct’ characters that they end up feeling clinical. If only the characters were a bit more over-the-top and irrational!
Perhaps the greatest deficit in the novel is poetry. The characters and their situations lack that subtle veil of poetry. They do not think; they act. Sometimes it feels that they also react on cue.
Honestly, who could believe a fight between two Maltese men working in construction which does not even have one swear word? Even Alice’s extramarital affair lacks the sensuality and daring that would justify the husband’s extreme reaction.
On a design level, the book is clearly type-set, but has an absolutely horrendous front cover. The colours, ‘special effects’, and image layering jar with all the pomp and rhetoric of the introduction. It does not convey in anyway the feeling of the book. Even more perplexing is the random pencil drawing thrown in Chapter 88 in an otherwise imageless book.
The style of this novel belongs to the highly contrived melodramatic romances that used to be read on the radio when I was young. Indeed, the author comes from a family of authors who wrote in such a style (Emilio and Elio Lombardi are his great-grandfather and father respectively).
I remember my grandmother used to enjoy the rumanzi immensely, but unfailingly at the end of each episode she would turn to me and say, ‘dawn mhux vera ta!’ (‘these aren’t real you know!’).
L-Aħħar Bewsa would have worked if it had been presented as such, and not taken itself seriously. Having the novel lauded and ‘approved’ before it even starts not only places it in a different literary category, but also raises one’s expectations.