Mark-Anthony Falzon reviews Il-Fiera tal-Fuħħar u Stejjer Oħra (The pottery fair and other stories) by Joe Friggieri
Anyone who is remotely interested in Maltese literature will be familiar with the work of Joe Friggieri. Among his output are five plays, three poetry collections, a stack of music lyrics and, perhaps most notably, short story collections that include the perenially popular L-Istejjer tar-Ronnie (The Ronnie chronicles) and Ħrejjef għal Żmienna (Tales for our times).
This book is an elegantly-produced collection of 25 short – very short at times – stories. Structurally and thematically, variety is the name of the game here. The one constant is the pared-down quality of Friggieri’s prose. Readers looking for language acrobatics will be disappointed, but it is precisely the economical simplicity of words that makes these pieces so beguiling.
To those who know the man, this will not come as a surprise. Friggieri has a way with words that fires up the most mundane of subjects and the stalest of jokes.
The eponymous story is a good example of this. Nothing much happens by way of plot, but Friggieri’s nose for description and narration ultimately delivers a rewarding read. This and other stories in the collection (Pjazza Reġina, for example) are rather like rhopographic still life, “the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that ‘importance’ constantly overlooks”.
Polifemu (Polyphemus) explores the fuzzy and porous line between hero and monster
Some of the pieces are obviously the work of Friggieri the professor of philosophy. Polifemu (Polyphemus) explores the fuzzy and porous line between hero and monster, a theme that is well-trodden in Greek mythology (in the encounter between Theseus and the Minotaur, for example).
Il-Bejjiegħ tal-Fanali (The lamp seller) picks up on the metaphor of light as truth and wisdom and renders it into a captivating tale.
Il-Ballun tal-Ħadid (The iron ball) tells the story of a falling metal ball that very nearly kills a scientifically-minded professor of Latin literature. It’s really about how magic and rationality can co-exist: “kollox għandu l-kawża tiegħu… imma qatt ma nistgħu nkunu nafu x’se jiġri minna, ix-xorti li se tmissna”, which roughly translates as “nothing happens without a cause… but there’s no way of knowing what will come upon us, what chance might bring our way”.
If Friggieri were an anthropologist, I’d suspect that he transposed the famous granary passage from Evans-Pritchard’s book on magic among the Azande. But he is not, so I’ll call it convergent evolution.
Sejba Storika (A historic find) stands alone as a satirical poke at bureaucracy and expertise. When an ancient chest bearing the arms of Grandmaster Pinto and containing a message in a bottle is unearthed in Rabat, a cast of heritage grandees and scholars (postmodern philosophers, theologians, conservators, historians, and so on) fall over each other with their expert advice. Since spoilers do reviews no favours, let’s just say the Sejba Storika ends up neither much of a find, nor particularly historic.
Matters of the heart, too, make an appearance. Fuq it-Tren (On the train) starts out as a brief if perceptive reflection on the different ways of getting there but soon turns into a description of the kind of force of inertia sometimes known as ‘love’.
It-Tajra tal-Baħar (The seabird) tells of the love, at once consuming and inconsumable, of a seabird for a man, and how it would head back to the cliffs and wail the night away, waiting for time to pass, heartbroken. On dark nights in spring and early summer, the cliffs along the southwestern coasts of Malta and Gozo come alive with the wails of seabirds flying in to their nests. To me, that sound will never again feel or mean quite the same. Simple words are not to be underestimated.
Il-Fiera tal-Fuħħar u Stejjer Oħra by Joe Friggieri (Kite 2018) is available in bookshops.