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Oliver Friggieri: Hekk Tħab­bat il-Qalb Maltija: Triloġija. Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2013, 733 pp.

This massive volume contains the text of three novels previously published separately by the author: It-Tfal Jiġu bil-Vapuri (2000), La Jibnazza Niġi Lura (2006), Dik id-Dgħajsa f’Nofs il-Port (2010).

The author, a leading academic and man of letters whose name has become a byword for Maltese literature in our country, has personally confirmed my impression that this trilogy was not originally conceived as such.

A careful reading will reveal, for instance, that a few characters, who are purely two-dimensional in the first volume, assume a much greater importance in the following volumes.

Indeed, Katarin, mother of Susanna, whose sad story is at the heart of the first volume, develops a third dimension in the other two volumes and becomes a key figure, together with the brave and saintly parish priest Dun Grejbel, of the trilogy.

The successful dramatisation of the novels, even as Friggieri was writing them, must have been an incentive for the work’s final completion as a trilogy. There are saints and sinners, and though the work’s original protagonist, Susanna, suffers several misfortunes and has a habit of choosing the wrong man for her important relationships, Friggieri makes sure that his plot never becomes old-fashioned melodrama. In fact, the trilogy eschews the black and white that sometimes characterised its television adaptation.

In It-Tfal Jiġu bil-Vapuri, Susanna is seduced and made pregnant by a hot-blooded but unscrupulous, young man, nameless in this volume but given the name of Stiefnu in the other two.

The girl’s angry father throws her out of the house and she is sheltered for one night by Dun Grejbel, a priest whose morality is ahead of his time – we are in the early 20th century – and who finds her a job as a housemaid in the house of a wealthy, upper-class woman and her adopted son Arturu.

When she gives birth, her tyrannical father has the child removed from her and given away, making sure he does not know to whom.

Dun Grejbel goes on being charitable to Susanna by having her get back her job, even though the Old Lady (nameless) has now died, so she will be living in the house where Arturu still lives. The young man, who has lived a sheltered life, is attracted to her and marries her, as Dun Grejbel recommends. But the marriage is a failure, and the girl leaves the house and her husband.

Dun Grejbel, following adverse reports on his behaviour to his bishop, loses his parish and is ordered to go abroad.

In La Jibbnazza Niġi Lura, the strong tone of the narrative changes strongly. The emphasis is on Katarina, now a widow, whose deep religious beliefs dictate the way she acts. As the church bell rings, summoning people to pray, Katarin kneels before the statue of St Joseph, to whom the church is dedicated. She is a devotee of the saint, with whom she communes in a naive but touching manner, praying so that he brings Susanna and her young son back together.

All this takes up many of the novel’s early pages, which have the atmosphere of a sacred ritual. Susanna is reunited with her son, Wistin, whom she has not seen since birth, and Katarin’s great happiness is to have them live with her. This is one of the returns in the book’s title, the other one being that of Dun Grejbel.

This is engineered, strangely enough, by Stiefnu, Susanna’s former lover, who finds the courage to seek an interview with the bishop. With his eloquence, he convinces the latter that Dun Grejbel has been greatly wronged and deserves to come back to Malta and his parish.

The priest’s return is celebrated with a feast by the parishioners, who have realised his goodness and holiness.

His reunion with Susanna and her son is a happy one, but he becomes aware of Susanna’s need for a man and of her uncertain relationship with Wistin, a reserved boy who asks for his father and is fobbed off with tales that his father will one day come back on a ship.

Susanna is persuaded to get back together with Arturo, but though they do this, the result is far from the happiness they may have wished for.

The trilogy is very rarely a page-turner but it often reveals Friggieri as the mature thinker he is

Wistin is very unhappy living in the house of his stepfather, and Susanna now knows for sure that Stiefnu was never ready to take her as his partner and that she herself no longer harbours any love for him. She realises that her future happiness lies neither in the harbour area, where Stiefnu makes a precarious living as a bumboat man (bumbot in this volume, becoming bambott in the third and last), nor in the large house where she now lives with Arturu. The house is far removed in spirit and personal relations from the village where she comes from, and to which she begins to feel she must return.

The whole situation comes to a head in the third volume, in which Wistin is now in love. His age is never made clear, but he seems to have got started with sex quite early.

He is hostile not just to Arturu, but also towards his mother. Her ambiguous reputation make his lover Antonia’s parents’ unwilling to accept him as a possible son-in-law. Wistin leaves the house and goes to live with Stiefnu, whom he now knows to be his biological father.

Susanna’s tribulations now include the death of Arturu and the subsequent miscarriage of a child fathered by him. Her next tribulation is Stiefnu trying to make her sell her house, of which she is now sole owner.

This is, perhaps, the weakest point of the plot, as Susanna does not seem to have inherited any income from her husband. She just has a large suitcase full of money. Surely, this goes beyond any melodrama with which I am acquainted.

This is the author’s ploy for having Susanna go back to her mother and live in the village, earning a modest income from selling flowers for Pawlu, a well-to-do farmer and street-seller who is sweet on her and whom she accepts as her suitor.

Though the novel does not narrate their wedding, it is clear that this is very much on the cards. One hopes she has not found yet another dud, but Pawlu has the great advantage in the trilogy of being an honest villager.

Dun Grejbel does quite a few good things in this volume, including the giving of elementary reading and writing classes in the village wine shop. But these good deeds do not include warning Susanna that Stiefnu may be defrauding her, as indeed has happened, for he has kept the money for himself to leave not just the harbour, but Malta so as to enjoy his ill-gotten money abroad.

Friggieri wants us to see the (unnamed) village in which most of the action takes place as a microcosm of Malta, before the great changes that overtook her after World War II. Contrasted with the harbour area, where Stiefnu struggles to make a living without bothering his head about morals, the village has a community of people who live off the land and are strong Christian believers, enjoying the religious celebrations, in particular the feast of the village patron, St Joseph.

What Friggieri fails to show is the average villager’s interest in making money and their hostility to those who seek to deprive them of it. His Susanna, however, does not try to see if she can give Stiefnu the large sum of money he requests without having to sell her large house; no lawyer or notary is ever mentioned, and she hands him unquestioningly a large sum without ensuring that Wistin will be the major beneficiary.

Stiefnu is a scoundrel but at least he tries to do things. Wistin, almost as unpleasant as his father, can only think of running away and of doing odd jobs in the village or at the harbour. Nothing is ever said about his education, even though Susanna has been taught by Arturu to read and write, so perhaps she is partly to blame for the boy’s ignorance and illiteracy.

What Friggieri shows us about him is a natural intelligence that makes him scorn the tales his mother used to tell him about birth and other delicate matters.

Friggieri is much more interested in ideas than in plot laying and development. The second volume, in particular, is characterised by very long dialogues and detailed descriptions of minor characters.

He lingers especially over the Bishop’s door-keeper at great length; a treatment many novelists reserve for main characters. Not much of interest, barring Dun Grejbel’s triumphal return, happens.

The perceptive reader will undoubtedly enjoy Friggieri’s poetical concept of the novel. The village, with its church as a centre of holiness, and the nearby valley where sexual indiscretions happen, are contrasted with the harbour’s incessant activity, large ships and bars full of drunken men.

This is the opposite of the restraints of the village wine shop, where Dun Grejbel is often a drinker and also an educator.

The real ships in the harbour are contrasted with the fabled ships said to transport new babies, and the kite Susanna buys the young Wistin, which rarely seems to take off, symbolises the aspirations of the boy, few of which he fulfils by the end of the third volume.

The trilogy is very rarely a page-turner but it often reveals Friggieri as the mature thinker he is.

It is a stately poem on the Malta of the past, somewhat idealised but written with love. This large volume should adorn the shelves of those who still find it a pleasure to read literature in Maltese.

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