Mużajċi tat-Tafal 
by Joe Camilleri 
published by Horizons, 2020

“Modern man,” the French philosopher-poet Paul Valéry once said, “no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated... It is as if the decline of the idea of eternity coincided with the increasing aversion to sustained effort.”

There is a school of thought which holds that even storytelling has witnessed this destiny. It is a fact, however, that legends, fairy tales, anecdotes and colourful gossiping – very often stories in a nutshell – have been with us long before the era which tentatively but consistently has been trying to send “eternity” into oblivion.

There are, today more than ever, many nameless storytellers in the streets and squares of Malta and Gozo, and on the internet. It takes, however, a sensitive and intelligent author to present a written version of such oral bartering of ideas and to analyse them with an insight into the depths of human nature.

One such author is Joe Camilleri and one such written version is his latest publication, Mużajċi tat-tafal (mosaics of clay).

In the ‘here and now’ culture of instant information, even our inner ‘self’ is deemed to be a faraway phenomenon which we reluctantly approach. The short stories of Mużajċi make the reader realise not only the discrepancy between the naked ‘self’ – the core of the persona – and the performing ‘personality’ – the public face – but also, in some circumstances, make him or her aware of one’s own rejected thoughts.

This is the leitmotif of Mużajċi from the introduction to the blurb. Camilleri discerns men and women beyond the mask of personality. In most of these short stories, Camilleri catches human nature red-handed in its deficiencies and inconsistencies, its foibles and hypocrisies, its discreet vices and its arrogant ones.

Camilleri discerns men and women beyond the mask of personality

The intoxication of alienating fantasies (which in Maltese I would call is-sakra tal-istħajjil) has the power to heavily condition and disrupt the actual life of a person or of a community. However, with Camilleri, life’s vagaries never stretch credulity beyond breaking point.

The stories capture reality and are exquisitely balanced with a  bittersweet flavour in a narrative with regular moods and modes... along with some welcome interruptions, as with Ftajjar tal-Makku, which even though lamenting the loss of a pet puppy, draws out, in the innocent mourning of the altar boys, a smile from the reader, and in Kwestjonarju waqt X-ray, a love story in prose poetry, ingeniously narrated.

The narrative in Mużajċi is sustained by a language rich in metaphor, imagery and stirring detail. The author is able to catch the attention of the reader from the first simple sentence of the story and to keep him or her engrossed throughout.

The psychological connection of the events is not forced upon the reader. One can take it within one’s stride and, like some sort of detective, as in working out a crossword, anticipate the next move. But then, all of a sudden, the author has a way of upsetting the reader’s foreboding.

Camilleri employs another interesting stratagem. Very often, the story is left free from a conclusion in the final scene. It is left open-ended. In this way, the narrative achieves an amplitude beyond the perusal.

The dialogue in these short stories is brisk, factual and to the point. In some of them, Camilleri presents the Gozitan dialect – if one is born and bred in Gozo, somehow this is bound to surface.

The detail in the descriptions of people and places betrays in Camilleri the discerning eye of the art critic. However, the clues  deduced from conversations and relationships tell much more than meets the eye: from manners  and mannerisms of religious practice or superstition to sexual  innuendos, from ministerial idiosyncrasies to intimate postural attitudes in moments of love or lust.

For this too forms part of that curious phenomenon called ‘Man’ in whom, according to orthodox Freudian doctrine, there exists a pressure of the unconscious upon conscious existence, and the unconscious is described as chaotic, primordial and instinctual. There is proof enough of all this in Camilleri’s Mużajċi.

The poet Trilussa has some verses in Roman dialect: “Adamo chiese: E come voi che faccia / a conservarmi l’anima innocente / se Dio mi fabbricò co’ la mollaccia” (Adam asked: How can I preserve the innocence of my spirit, if God has produced me out of mud!)

The men and women in Camilleri’s Mużajċi are not of “mud” but of “clay”. Civilisation and culture may have turned the mud into the nobler clay... but clay, like mud, still remains a derivative of earth and water.