Knocking on realism's door

Lina Brockdorff's last publication, which includes a detailed and erudite study by Pawlu Mizzi, has a long story to tell. And the author has a penchant of her own on how to tell a story. Emotionally intense and intimately beguiling, her stories often spring from covert memoirs, verging on the autobiography of thoughts, experiences, imagination and desires, and at the same time give an overt picture of the inner self. Nakedness is spread all over the pages. But it is not a carnal nakedness. Rather, it is the nakedness of the inner self; of the soul.

This soul in Ms Brockdorff's stories has a gender: feminine. Ms Brockdorff has a knack of materialising this inner realism in space and time, and at the same time she has an ability to turn her personal experiences and encounters into a universal story.

Admittedly, her realism is distant from that of women writers like Rebecca Harding Davis or Doris Lessing, both champions of stark realism, in their different ways, but Ms Brockdorff, while setting a limit to her realism, is aware that only fables always have a silvery ending.

In the same short-story Ms Brockdorff often makes use of a non-linear style to look at things from different angles, and not just from the straight and narrow. In these instances, she is at her best; uncompromisingly albeit unpretentiously herself as an author. However, at times she allows a dose of sentimentality and self-patronising morality and a pedagogical attitude to interfere with her views. The effect is often a dissonant jar or an unexpected twist. If one could speak of a musical structure in her writing it is music of dissonances. The unbridled and spontaneous writer is at the same time refrained by her psychological and moral concerns, nearly overstepping the threshold of the imagination of her readers.

No wonder that contrasting words like dmugh/sliem; biki/dahk; mibeghda/imhabba; qilla/mahfra; accettazzjoni/ribelljoni; hajja/mewt are often used side by side giving an effect of unusual modulation to a musical manuscript. Actually, these are stories of contradictions, the stuff that makes our lives interesting, and often unexpectedly so.

Often the author is vague and allusive but also detailed and verbose and directional when required to do so. Provocative but to a set limit. Her provocation is more a captivating stimulus than a gimmicky shock or a literary experiment. Ms Brockdorff lets her ideas move with her characters.

Like a musical leitmotif of the late romanticism, the first story in the collection gives a detailed sample of the style and content one is bound to find in the rest of the short stories. Ethereal yet very imaginatively descriptive, misty and colourful, with a sense of commitment from a distance.

Ms Brockdorff has a fascination for words. Simple and everyday words. Poetical and elaborated words. Metaphors and similes mingle with other crude, unadorned idioms. Her occasional pinch of humour verges on the cynical, render the reading more pleasant and moving. The titles of most of her stories (Gbart Caghka; Fdal tal-Hobz ghall-Klieb; Id-Dinja Regghet Tbissmet; Is-Sigar li Jzommu Id f'Id; Meta Jixxarbu l-Gwienah) are very poetically striking and effect our imagination. They tell the story in a nutshell.

• Mr Peresso is a seasoned writer and broadcaster. Twice a week, he reads a selection from a Maltese novel on Radio Malta, having succeeded Charles Arrigo in this popular local programme.
• A review copy of this title was supplied by Klabb Kotba Maltin.