‘Qabel Ingħalaq il-Bieb’ reviewed: a highly sentimental read

Qabel Ingħalaq il-Bieb

by Alfred Massa

published by Horizons

A door is often a symbol of separation, as it normally separates one part from another. But whenever we pass by a closed door, we rarely ever give a thought as to what joy, sadness, grief, secrets, miseries or mysteries lie beyond. How many of these emotions, and surprises, that door may have in store for us, if we only bother to get to know and decide to delve through.

Alfred Massa, one of the most prolific of Maltese novelists, has indeed bothered to delve dramatically through one such door in this his latest novel, Qabel Ingħalaq il-Bieb, another enthralling story that is both gripping and emotionally very touching with a sad background of nostalgia adding deep purple to the otherwise sweet-sad scenario.

One day, during a walk with his children, Maurice passes by the house in which he was born, where he grew up and lived for a good number of years. The questions asked by his children, Kevin and Helga, soon touch on his emotions and carry him back to his boyhood and his young days, with a strong touch of painful nostalgia, as he recalls the years he had spent in that house, behind that closed door. 

The house with the closed door sadly stands in a state of sheer abandon, but what happened in it still lives. Photo: Shutterstock.com

Now, the house with the closed door, sadly stands in a state of sheer abandon, but what happened in it still lives; moments of utter humanity: of love, happiness, sorrow, anger, despair, intolerance, and... hope! Indeed, everything that happens in every house where one lives, where families live, and invariably close the door over their individual dramas.

Once again, Massa, in his own narrative style, reaching out even further as he experiences more of life and its brief moments of joy darkened by others of sadness, very tactfully takes the reader along with Maurice and his children to that derelict house, to that closed door – to the past, to other times, to an abandoned house that is now a symbol of a decayed age, eerily shrouded as it stands isolated in an aura of mystery.

Qabel Ingħalaq il-Bieb is a highly sentimental and very readable novel, that will carry the reader along with it in a vast variety of sentiments and emotions, at intervals painfully evoking a past most of us would want to remember as we go on through a present we’d rather want to forget.