Island Faces: Four Novellas From Malta
by Lino Spiteri, translated by Joseph Agius
Allied Publications pp 238
ISBN: 9789990931648
I leaf through Lino Spiteri’s new collection of novellas, Island Faces, translated by Joseph Agius, for the first time aboard the impeccably polished, feel-good world of the A330 jet that is ferrying me from Doha to Denpasar.
The charm and appeal of a capitalist modernity, its captivating embrace, parade themselves everywhere around me. And likewise, the book cover complements my experience: it is very white and invitingly sleek, elegantly de-signed, almost innocuous. And it reads Island Faces – Four Novellas from Malta. Well, I tilt back my adjustable seat accordingly, and ready myself for a laid-back evening.
I could not have been more mistaken. The four short fictions in this collection offer a deeply unsettling inquiry into the economic, cultural and social forces that altered the public and private facets of Malta and the Maltese over the past half century.
Their protagonists are often the products of a pre-industrial frame of mind that Mr Spiteri, with astonishing narrative dexterity, thrusts willy-nilly into the lapsed, unsparing universe of the postmodern present – very often to tragic effect. Ditched by a lover looking for a brief fling, Maridor, the country woman in Wild Clover, sustains a deep scar that can only resolve itself through a deeper one. Rita’s liaison with a British officer in Under a Dying Moon costs her her life in the hands of Tona, a black-clad widow and agent of the crushing weight of moral tradition. In The Innocent, the university-educated, libertine Margaret awakens her cousin Randu, the young, unwitting farmer from a rural hinterland to the crude and unforgiving rules of a sexually liberated Europe.
The book title itself highlights the searing contrasts and ambivalences that make Mr Spiteri’s latest literary venture so captivating. Island Faces is anything but face-value narration. The stories are invested in conjuring regional, Maltese and Mediterranean stereotypes, like the sturdy, tanned and unsophisticated young farmer, the voluptuous, olive-skinned young woman, keening widowhood and so forth, only to undercut them by subjecting his characters to intense psychological scrutiny. There is little space – or time – for nostalgia in Mr Spiteri’s stories.
Writing of Mediterranean islanders, Predrag Matvejevic has noted that these never feel they are on terra firma, and they, “Have more time for waiting than others – waiting marks their time”. Mr Spiteri’s characters are structured by the lure of an expected unknown and its attendant anxieties: characters like Zora the Wise in Wild Clover, the murderous figures of Tona in Under a Dying Moon and Maridor in Wild Clover, and Rita and Frans – their respective victims – as well as the aging civil servant tempted by a stunning beauty in A Death Out of Season stand as allegories of the psychological gulf that had opened up in the course of the country’s transition from colonial rule to national autonomy, the aggressive advent of capital in Malta, the liberal influxes from the continent and encompassing all of them, the pervasive presence of religious morality that survived and retained its hold over the island, emerging practically unscathed even as forceful student uprisings rocked Europe in the late 1960s.
Mr Spiteri wisely hands the prerogative of judgement over to his readers: as social freedoms, sexual liberation and capitalism encroach on the island’s relatively untouched moral status quo, the latter retaliates through the dictates of a draconian moral universe. In the process, Mr Spiteri depicts the inevitably distorted value judgements that accompany both libertinism and religious zealotry when taken to their extremes.
Hence, the pious Tona takes justice into her own hands and punishes Rita’s brief, promiscuous flirt with colonial masculinity as a form of liberation by drowning her. “Innocent” Randu attempts to punish the liberated Margaret (aka Gerit), who had unprotected intercourse with him – because he was “the last virgin” – by luring her into unprotected sex after his own few weeks of reckless promiscuity. Randu’s ability to graft trees is forever warped by Margaret’s worldview. The clover is stained red by the moral fall of the archetypal mother Maridor as well as the moral shallowness of a newly-autonomous island selling itself out. In these narratives of a post-colonial Malta, things, as W.B. Yeats would put it, have fallen apart, and anarchy is let loose upon the main characters’ degenerating world.
Harold Bloom has noted a particular mark of finely wrought fictive characters that is very true of the ones presented in this book: the character’s ability to listen to his or her own thoughts and to shadow, up close and self-consciously, one’s evolving thoughts, feelings and attentions. This is what is particularly alluring in Mr Spiteri’s characters – like the three narrators in A Death Out of Season, they are all acutely self-conscious of the impact that their convulsive new experiences are having on their own thoughts, actions, on their deep psychic self.
Mr Spiteri’s ability to unfold his plot through a metaphoric narrative action is seamless, as in the instances in The Innocent when he evokes relations between characters through unadorned descriptions of agricultural procedures. The discourse of tree-grafting here pre-empts the sexual activity that would follow between Randu and Margaret by indicating, for instance, that, “He then used the point of his blade to prise the bark open until he had exposed the green, succulent pith beneath”.
Descriptions of the exterior world are harnessed as pointers to the frequently intense drama that happens within, with a social realist layer of narration that drifts in and out of the unutterable workings of the individual mind, and vice-versa. This form of narration manipulates the reader’s emotions such that one tends to empathise with Randu’s situation, register shock at Maridor’s and Tona’s excessive revenge, or otherwise feel miffed at the sexually “liberated” Margaret’s searing indifference to Randu’s emerging emotions.
Moreover, the central consciousness in each story is afflicted by an uncanny element, a language of silence that accounts for the sense of inscrutability that underpins each account. These silences that cover deep spiritual or psychological ailments often come across through modes of silent contact between characters: hence, Rita in Under a Dying Moon is mute, Randu the Innocent is “dumbfounded” by Margaret’s urbane allure, Maridor carries a traumatic, unrequited past deep within her soul and her husband Kieli is a man of few words. Characters often communicate very intensely through glances, body language and the sheer energy of their presence itself, hence imparting their essence by projecting public personas beneath which lurks an affective potential of terrifying proportions.
The dilemmas faced by the characters of Island Faces are often resolved in terms of a dark, brooding energy that both structures and afflicts their experience – a disturbing, contingent feeling that cannot be easily articulated or verbally accounted for but one that can, nevertheless, wreak profound internal chaos and irreversible repercussions for the community.
Like the girl’s fiercely reticent attraction in Death Out of Season, this unspeakable essence becomes the fiery kernel of each narrative. The characters’ inability to address their internal turmoil in a rational and objective manner often accounts for those agonising moments of helplessness the reader experiences as their plots – and fates – evolve.
Mr Spiteri’s portrayals of contemporary youth as Malta undergoes seismic cultural, political and economic change are believable and visceral, even as Mr Spiteri ultimately hands over the prerogative of passing value judgments to his reader. His knowledge of fishing and agricultural processes and rituals is remarkable and the stories may be of anthropological significance, since they bring together the rituals of pre-industrial society with a disturbing literary vision of Maltese society as it operates within the broader contexts of regional transition and the advent of capitalist modernity to the Mediterranean.
Insofar as they often test Malta’s communal imaginary to its tragic limits, Mr Spiteri’s stories are evocative of other celebrated Mediterranean characters, such as Elias Khoury’s Umm Hassan, the midwife in Gate of the Sun, which is strongly echoed in Mr Spiteri’s Zora the Wise, and more recently, the haunting Füsün in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, which reminds me of the alluring girl in the first story of Island Faces. The eminent potential of Island Faces on Malta’s local bookshelves and, more significantly, in international fairs, expos, literature festivals, non-Maltese readers’ collections and so forth cannot be under-estimated.
• Dr Bugeja lectures at the University of Malta.