Smells like teens and spirits

Mario Azzopardi is best known as a poet and theatre director. In the late 1960s he must have been the most demonised representative of his generation, an image he seemed to revel in. I remember him in the mid 1980s, well after those Sturm und Drang days, writing the words l’enfant terrible on a chalkboard and pointing at himself. At that time he was certainly not an enfant and did not look that terrible to us 16- and 17-year-olds attending his poetry class.

Forty years after he earned this reputation by writing poetry that shocked the local conservative literary circles and the perhaps more conservative reading public, Mario Azzopardi is looking for new readers. It is not that he has lost interest in his adult readers, as he still writes poetry and through the years his poetry developed into a mellower, more digestible fare. Still, his choice to write for teenagers surprised me, not because he does not know his target audience, an age group he taught for many years and is still involved with in his theatre work, but because I always thought that teenagers need to be treated with a bit more sensitivity than Mr Azzopardi can handle.

I have to say that the first story in this collection, and the one which gives it its title, did little to put me at ease. Within a few paragraphs there is a dead girl, and soon we know that she died of an overdose, after attempting to have casual sex. You start feeling sorry for the girl but then it suddenly dawns on you that this is just a covert way of pushing the Sedqa lesson plans. Since when has l’enfant terrible gone moralistic?

Luckily, the rest of the stories are much better, and have a less moralistic tone about them. I particularly enjoyed reading Kif Sefora tilfet Iz-Zokra, a surrealistic tale that is half-way between Little Red Riding Hood and Boxing Helena, which is, I suppose, what good young adult fiction is all about. It is a story about a girl who lets in an adult into her home and ends up losing all that she is to this man. I know, it is still Sedqa territory, but it is done in a very poetic way.

Folji mid-Djarju ta’ Ruth is also a very interesting story. By using a 14-year-old girl’s diary entries, Mr Azzopardi gets to talk about a lot of issues that are important to young people: Peer pressure, drugs (again), teenage pregnancies, losing parents through separation and so on. Ruth also gets to think about local and international politics. I start to think that this cannot be a 14-year-old speaking. I do not know many 14-year-olds who spare a thought about war crimes or terrorism (I must say I do not know any at all who can quote Mr Azzopardi’s poetry like Ruth does), but then Ruth admits she is not "normal" like her peers, where normality means superficial and materialistic. In this sense, Ruth is one of the characters you expect to find in this type of fiction an individual whose uncertainties are a mark of strength rather than a weakness; someone who other young people can feel at ease with but who is maybe just a little step ahead of them.

There are eight stories in this collection, with subjects ranging from immigration to witchcraft. I have to say I liked most of them, and I guess young people would feel more at ease with the references to The Black Eyed Peas, Eminem and Green Day than I did. If I were a 16-year-old, I think I would buy this book, but I would wish it was not called Alicia Titkellem mill-Imwiet. It is just so uncool.

• Dr Galea teaches Maltese literature and theatre history at the University of Malta.
• A review copy of this title was supplied by Merlin Library Ltd.