Arloġġ Ta’ Darba
Charles Flores
Horizons pp160
ISBN: 978-99957-21-11-4

The role of an author is to slap the reader to consciousness. It is to seduce us to strange places and give us a passport to emotions unknown and to uninhabited islands in the sea of our imagination.

To draw us to a beautiful kind of loneliness. To leave us breathless, relentless and make us fall in love with language, over and over again. To lead us into temptation and multiple interpretations.

The role of a journalist, on the other hand, focuses to a crosshair. While the author gathers inspiration and generates multiple interpretations, the journalist hunts for just one interpretation; one to authenticate and to derive meaning from.

Charles Flores is one of the few to have managed to bridge these two roles successfully. A journalist and broadcaster who showed his mettle and character during the political turmoil of the 1980s, Mr Flores is also a notable and prolific poet and author. He was one of the co-founders of the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju, won the 1996 Commonwealth Short Story competition (Europe and Canada region) and has also been published and translated widely.

Lino Spiteri, in his introduction to Mr Flores’s latest publication Arloġġ ta’ Darba, describes this journalist/author marriage as one between journalistic experience and literary ability and conscience. This is immediately shown in the first chapter, entitled Traġedja f’Jum id-Duluri (Tragedy on the feast of our Lady of Sorrows). Karl Caruana, Mr Flores’s thinly disguised fictional counterpart, recounts how in his early days as a journalist with the newspaper Ix-Xefaq (The Horizon), he is sent to report on a fatal accident in Merchants Street. While the journalist reports on the tragic death of the female victim, the author sees and feels the visual echoes of Michelangelo’s Pietà in the figure of the dead woman.

Arloġġ ta’ Darba is the first time that Mr Flores has given both his journalistic and literary pursuits a single literary form, where the line between autobiography and fiction is intentionally blurred. And it works on both levels. As the memoirs of a journalist, Arloġġ ta’ Darba is a valuable memoir that shows how the life of a journalist is like a pendulum that swings between emotional extremes, from the humour of reporting from parliament to witnessing the tragedy if the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

Mr Flores, who held various editorial posts before being appointed information officer with the Department of Information, head of news and current affairs and head of radio with Xandir Malta and head of publishing with the Public Broadcasting Services, is also a survivor of that eternal battle for journalistic objectivity and freedom.

As a fictional account, Arloġġ ta’ Darba is a well-written narrative that shadows journalist Karl Caruana from childhood to adolescence and maturity as he comes to terms with personal, national and international upheaval and with how news shapes and changes both him and the world.