Oliver Friggieri’s novel takes us back to the 1950s, a time when parents could pull off thwarting truths and kids had the decency of knowing when to stop asking questions.
The novel, magnificently translated to English by Rose Marie Caruana, is full of vivid yet unpretentious descriptive prose which renders the book human and soft despite the reader’s difficulty of imagining circumstances which are now, to say the least, obsolete.
The story revolves around the young Toninu and his coming of age as he grows up in the Balzunetta area in Floriana. Sheltered by a hard-working father who loves his family dearly and who seems to have braved an arduous past, a mother who was only ever loved by her husband after her own mother had died giving birth to her, and an aunt, a self-righteous yet unhappy spinster, Toninu was thus more sensitive to life’s hardships than other children his age.
Friggieri brings into the book characters that belong to the old Maltese village life. Some of the more colourful figures are Brother Klement and Feliċ Ħarufa, Ġużeppi l-Landier – the Stejjer ta’ Qabel Jidlam character – Il-Koranta, and Leli tal-Forn.
These characters are weaved into the novel by Friggieri and help to give a structure and sense to the character formation of young Toninu. The character of Il-Koranta, the unmarried 40-year-old woman, who on the day of her marriage to Ġużeppi l-Landier was ridiculed and persecuted by the people of her local community to the point where she had to be eschewed from the back door of the church, is proof of the stifling and sorry state Malta was in at the time. Little would these people have guessed that decades later, precisely last year, The UK’s Sunday Times would publish a study claiming that single women in their 40s are much happier than their married counterparts.
Feliċ Ħarufa was a poor ragged man who was dubbed “ir-raġel ta’ l-ixkora” (the bogey man). Not only did this man have to carry the burden of his plight but parents also projected him to their children as a symbol of fear, telling them that if they disobeyed Feliċ Ħarufa would surely throw them in his sack and they would never see their family again. It was thanks to Brother Klement that Toninu realised that the poor man was in fact a harmless good soul.
His grandfather’s death on the day when school was to break for the summer holidays depicts an eight-year-old’s first brush with death. Sex and death shroud the novel as later on extreme measures are taken to ensure that Toninu does not find out the real reason behind his mother’s gaining weight. This was purposely avoided so as not to arouse difficult questions from the boy which would obviously induce the three-letter word “sex”.
Toninu’s mother’s overbearing protection over her son is stifling to the point where the readers lose their patience with her. When she sees Toninu’s worry and anxiety over his dove’s escapade, she tries to explain to him what her husband had explained to her about Toninu once he grows up: that when you love someone unconditionally at some point you would have to let them go. This however seems too hard for her to follow as a credo. She turns ballistic when she finds Toninu leafing through an art book his teacher had given him as she cannot bear to see her son looking at female bodies with clear delineated curves.
A family feud also arises when her sister-in-law informs her husband that she had spotted Toninu in the company of a girl, which led to the interrogation of the boy to make sure that his aunt was wrong. Unhealthily spinning her life around her son, this house-bound woman advanced in life grappling with the terror that one day her son would leave, even before the time she stipulated.
Progress and technology have led to completely different values and beliefs and Friggieri’s novel inculcates this to perfection posing doubts and provoking disputes as to whether that life was really better than the one we are living now. Even though some descriptive passages are fairly long, this book is a true masterpiece.
Ms Gatt believes that literature helps us to live a fuller life.
This book is available at Word for Word, Castille Place, Valletta