‘Larinġa/Orange’ by Maria Grech Ganado

This poem is from a collection I picked up at a poetry showcase as a teenager, at a time when I was desperately filtering the local literary landscape for writers I could feel an affinity with. Being bilingual, this meant writers who also wrote and were published in English. Maria Grech Ganado is one of those writers I discovered then, and whose writing has stayed with me always. ‘Orange’ is published alongside its Maltese equivalent, ‘Larinġa’ in this collection. It’s a short, anecdotal poem that recalls a moment of intimacy between two lovers who are ‘sitting together on the kitchen step / peeling oranges’. The literal orange is transformed by language into a vehicle for exploring the erotic tension between the couple. I particularly love the repetition of the word ‘felli’ in the Maltese version, which, when read aloud, has a rhythmic pattern that is missing in its English equivalent, ‘segments’.

From Memory Rape, Inizjamed and Midsea Books, 2005

‘Sleeping Woman, Jilted’ by Abigail Ardelle Zammit

This poem reminds me of my conversations with Abigail on the possibilities of writing beyond the boundaries of received stereotypes of national identity, when she was my creative writing tutor at the University of Malta. The prehistoric clay statuette known as the ‘Sleeping Woman’ has become such a ubiquitous icon of the Maltese Islands. Drop into any souvenir shop and you’re bound to run into her in one form or another, as a fridge magnet, postcard, bottle opener – you name it. ‘Sleeping Woman, Jilted’ begins with the blessing ‘I wish you many lovers’ and goes on to carve out the living form of the goddess of fertility in a series of images that reminds me of Carol Ann Duffy’s reclaiming of the female perspective in Standing Female Nude. I consider it a quiet act of iconoclasm against the more lazy, disingenuous explorations of Malteseness.

Longlisted for the 2015 Montreal Poetry Prize. Available online here

Passaport by Antoine Cassar

Antoine Cassar is a polymath with a fascinating relationship towards language and identity, having grown up in England, Malta, and lived and worked between Spain, Italy, France and Luxembourg. Passaport – a poem self-published in the format of an actual passport – is in fact an anti-passport. It reads as a manifesto in defence of universal citizenship, advocating for a frontier-free world. It was written originally in Maltese and has since been translated into over ten languages. The poem is even more relevant now than when it was first published – both here in the UK, but also in Malta, where citizenship has been commodified thanks to the ‘cash for passport scheme’ introduced by the government. In light of this, the poem is a refreshing read, if somewhat utopian in vision, celebrating humanity above nationhood, freedom above borders, love above hate.

Self-published, 2009

‘Sandra’ by Clare Azzopardi

Clare Azzopardi’s short stories are full of humour and irony, with a surprise touch of horror introduced at the coda that reminds me of the stories of Poe or Sheridan Le Fanu. ‘Sandra’ is the first in a collection of eight stories, each named after a different woman. On the outside, these are ordinary women living very ordinary lives. Azzopardi, however, lets us in on their interior consciousnesses, which turn out to be anything but ordinary. Sandra is a young woman with a penchant for keys and lies. From a young age, she understands the power she can gain over people by leaving keys lying around to pique their curiosity. This leads her to ensnare friends, parents, lovers. She gets a huge thrill from these acts of subversion, which always end in misadventure. Like, for instance, losing her job as a car salesperson after luring her male colleague into stealing off the with the keys to the showroom Mercedes that ends in them crashing the car. I’m drawn to this story for its quirkiness and irreverence – the way it tiptoes nimbly between light and dark, like an X-rated fairy tale for adults.

from Kullħadd Ħalla Isem Warajh, Merlin, 2014

Two by Teodor Reljić

This is a quietly told, genre-bending novella, unravelled through the voice and imagination of a nine-year-old boy called William. On a family holiday to Malta to visit her parents, his mother suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma. In the soupy claustrophobia of a Mediterranean summer, William is left without the comfort of his mother to navigate the grief of his grandparents and his difficult relationship with his father. Running parallel to the main narrative is the consoling fantasy story of Vermillion, a young boy from a distant land, made up by his mother. This imaginative universe mirrors the real world, giving texture and depth to William’s darker thoughts and emotions. Although it’s an imperfect piece of writing in many ways, this book is ultimately a sensitively told tale about the redemptive power of storytelling.

Merlin, 2017

Is-Sriep Reġgħu Saru Velenużi by Alex Vella Gera

I wish to preface this selection with a bit of a preamble that I think gives some relevant context. In 2009, Alex Vella Gera published ‘Li Tkisser Sewwi’ in the campus publication, Ir-Realtà. The perceived obscenity of the story led to the publication being banned from the University and a highly controversial court case. The case culminated in a much-needed legal reform to Malta’s censorship laws and an acquittal for both author and editor. In an article published following the acquittal, Vella Gera stated:

I was inspired to write the story back in 1997 after comparing Maltese literature (written up to that time) with other literatures, major and minor, and finding it lacking in one particular element: genuine realism when dealing with the more sordid aspects of our world.

I would argue that Vella Gera achieves his aims far more skilfully in his novel Is-Sriep Reġgħu Saru Velenużi (The Snakes Have Once Again Become Poisonous). If I were hard pressed to choose only one ‘story’ on this list that I wished to see translated into English immediately, it would be this one. I was completely knocked sideways by this book. It is, to my mind, one of the most accurate and compelling depictions of Malteseness in contemporary fiction – ‘ugly bits’ included. Vella Gera is such a masterful writer in the way he handles the protagonist’s struggle with class and language, the political legacy of the Mintoffian era, the constant desire to escape, what it means to be an expat and our ambivalence towards Malta.

Merlin, 2012

‘In-nies ta’ maċ-ċint’ by Immanuel Mifsud

This story is an accurate reminder that some people get away with all forms of evil by couching their hatred in a language only spoken by 522,000 individuals in the world. Through the eyes of a schoolgirl, Mifsud lets the reader in on the attitudes of her parents, her friends, her sister, her teacher towards ‘the people over by the wall’ (‘in-nies ta’ maċ-ċint’). These are the migrant communities that inhabit the areas in and around the Marsa Open Centre. The story does a harrowing job of paraphrasing the kind of racist abuse that largely goes unchallenged in Malta. But the dominant voice of the majority – savage, uncouth, aggressive – does not inhibit the protagonist’s dawning realisation that she, too, has a voice, and that this voice might be used to say something different. A redemptive, powerful story that holds up a mirror to our collective shame and challenges us to take transformative action.

From L’Aqwa Żmien, Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2019

What Happens in Brussels, Stays in Brussels by Ġużè Stagno

This is a sardonic, laugh-out-loud and often cringe-worthy portrait of the Maltese abroad. It follows a journalist and a delegation of political canvassers on a press junket to Brussels orchestrated by MEP Charlo Pulis. Once in Brussels, the trip degenerates into a series of mishaps, misadventures and petty power struggles. Reading it feels like Stagno has taken a generous slice out of contemporary Maltese society – with all its stereotypes, vanities and profanities – and served it up in the form of an effortlessly written, highly compulsive novel. I wolfed this down like a guilty pleasure.

Merlin, 2013

‘I went to see her’ by Pierre J. Mejlak, translated by Antoine Cassar

I love the fable-like quality of this story: an ailing father recounts the memories of his past loves to his son who attends to him at his bedside. When they get talking about “the one in Spain”, the father urges his son “to promise to go and visit her before I die”, and proceeds to give him detailed directions to her house in Puntas de Calnegre. The son decides to fulfil his father’s dying wish and sets out to pay the woman a visit. This encounter is affirmative for them both. In his absence, they have the opportunity to re-evaluate the man who brought them together. Their gain, however, is tainted by the news that the father has died.

From Having Said Goodnight, Merlin, 2015. Available to read online here

‘Maria Concepción’ by Katherine Anne Porter

This astonishing story, set around the time of the Mexican revolution, is one that keeps coming to mind while driving around the peaceful country roads and village markets near our home in Thailand. Porter’s sensuous descriptions are uniquely memorable for the way they evoke landscapes and the characters situated in them. Maria Concepción is a stunning character, a powerful woman trying to adhere to the rules of her village society while longing for a child. Discovering her husband’s infidelity, she murders his mistress and appropriates her infant. Her actions are condoned by the community, which seems to survive only at great cost to individual women. Thanks to the enormous skill of the writer, the conflicts inherent in the patriarchal and colonial setting are not shrill and strident but woven intricately into the fabric of the story, which has the overall impression of a light-filled fresco. In an interview, Porter said that she took no more than an evening to pen a short story, with little further revision. Her extraordinary artistry is evident in this piece.

First published in 1922. Included in Flowering Judas, Penguin Random House, 2014. Available online here. A video interview with the author—from 1973, when she was in her eighties—is here

‘The Lady with the Dog’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett

Chekhov, like Chopin, is an artist who expresses an exquisite and open-ended vision of the sadness, hope, and folly of our lives. ‘The Lady with the Dog’ is one of my favorite Chekhov stories (tied neck-and-neck with his dog fable ‘Kashtanka’). The tale is one of petty adultery narrated in such a non-judgmental manner that you are drawn towards the characters and into the enduring mysteries of love. Gurov, a chauvinistic and womanizing Moscow banker, is on a summer vacation in Yalta, where he is attracted to Anna, the lady with a little dog, who is visiting from a provincial town. After a swift seduction and several weeks together, they return to their respective unhappily married lives. But the interlude is no summer fling, for each has been touched, for the first time, by love. Meeting in secret, the story ends with the lovers facing with grim resilience the troubles that must lie ahead. The writing is so compassionate towards the characters and their transformation, and to the arc of time itself, that it leaves you not only with a lump in the throat but a sense that so many of us are “birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages.”

First published in 1899. Included in The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett, Penguin Classics, 2002. Available online here

‘We Didn’t Like Him’ by Akhil Sharma

Sometimes a good story arrives in a style that appears plain and unadorned, devoid of any of the sartorial displays seen in the stories of Nabokov or Hemingway. ‘We Didn’t Like Him’ is a tale of relationships corrupted by social prejudice. Sharma writes clean and sonorous prose, making little use of visual descriptions, focusing on situations that reflect the harsh social attitudes of the narrator and his community. The narrator is an angry misanthrope, and his narrative voice has an authenticity that grows on you with each reading. The story, set in Delhi, is about his relationship with the widely disliked neighborhood bully Manshu, who grows up to become a corrupt priest and then falls prey to misfortune. The narrator’s dislike for Manshu and humanity itself is only tempered at the end of the story, when after several begrudging and angry acts of charity towards Manshu, he finally shows him some respect. All in all, it is a beautifully constructed piece, steeped in the rituals of life and death in a deeply hypocritical religious society.

First published in the New Yorker, May 27, 2013. Available online here

‘Enoch Soames’ by Max Beerbohm

I find it hard to explain why I like Max Beerbohm’s stories so much. The British caricaturist and dandy, author of the classic Oxford satire Zuleika Dobson, though witty, is not as great a short story writer as his fellow-Edwardian satirist Saki, and certainly not as funny or lovable as his contemporary P. G. Wodehouse. My attraction to Beerbohm is probably due to his prose style, for he was a student of Walter Pater, one of the great aesthetes of the Victorian age. Beerbohm’s somewhat frivolous but captivating story ‘Enoch Soames’ is encapsulated within the story itself in these memorable lines:

a riter ov th time, naimd Max Beerbohm, hoo woz stil alive in th twentieth senchri, rote a stauri in wich e pautraid an immajnari karrakter kauld ‘Enoch Soames’—a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with th Devvl in auder ter no wot posterriti thinx ov im! It iz a sumwot labud sattire but not without vallu az showing hou seriusli the yung men ov th aiteen-ninetiz took themselvz.

By arrangement with the Devil, Enoch Soames, a self-absorbed, absinthe-swilling fin-de-siècle poet whose most successful book sold no more than three copies, is projected to the Round Reading Room in the British Museum precisely a hundred years later (that is, to the afternoon of June 3, 1997), to discover the verdict of posterity. By then, people wear dull uniforms with their identification numbers sewed on, and they use a phonetic spelling (perhaps a nod to Beerbohm’s Café Royal fellow-patron George Bernard Shaw, who proposed one such spelling ‘reform’). The only reference Soames finds to himself is in a historical survey of late 19th-Century literature, quoted above. Naturally, the Devil comes to collect, but is that the end of Soames? Beerbohm’s narrator points out that anyone visiting the Round Reading Room on that afternoon in the future would be able to confirm, contrary to the historian’s claim, that Soames was far from imaginary. A short story penned by the American magician Teller and published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1997, tells of the events that transpired on a visit to the Round Reading Room on the prescribed date.

First published in 1916. Included in Seven Men, Heinemann, 1920. Available online here. Teller’s sequel in the Atlantic Monthly is here

‘The Island at Noon’ by Julio Cortázar, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

As a teenager, I had the good fortune to spend many of my summer holidays in the library of an uncle who owned a substantial collection of Latin American literature in translation. While I greatly enjoyed the colorful company of Amado, Asturias, Lispector, García Márquez, and many others, the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar was unknown to me until a decade later, when I read his story ‘The Southern Thruway’ in a class taught by his close friend, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. Cortázar, who seemed like a cosmopolitan kindred spirit, wowed me with the way he spun a story around a traffic jam, creating a stylish and surreal, time-stretching tale of how a sense of community can arise spontaneously and then briefly flourish before being swallowed up by humdrum reality.

Since then, one story of his that has become something of an obsession for me is ‘The Island at Noon’. It is the tale of Marini, an airline steward on the Rome-Tehran run who becomes obsessed with a Greek island called Xiros that they fly over every other day at noon. Seen from the plane window,the island was small and solitary, and the Aegean Sea surrounded it with an intense blue that exalted the curl of a dazzling and kind of petrified white, which down below would be foam breaking against the reefs and coves.Marini eventually escapes his relentless schedule (of travel and brief trysts with stewardesses) and gets down to Xiros, where after a swim, he climbs up a hill and gazes up into the sky, wondering if he will be able to completely obliterate his past self. It happens to be noon, and flying overhead is his plane, which is now doomed. By the end of the story, a circuit is completed; past and present, death above and life below are finally re-connected. Entranced by this story, I wrote a sequel ‘The Island Hereafter’, published in 2016.

First published in Spanish in Todos los fuegos el fuego, Sudamericana, 1966. First translation in All Fires The Fire, Pantheon, 1973. Available online here. A video, in Spanish and French, of the writer talking about his night walks around Paris is here