Ħolm... tal-bieraħ u tal-lum
by Salv Sammut
published by Horizons, 2023
I strongly believe that every artist, whatever his art, like a good wine, improves with his age, his years and his experiences. This particularly applies to an author, and the more so when the author is also a poet.
Salv Sammut is one such author, who has been prolifically active in the writing of the Maltese novel for many years, with a spate of very beautiful stories particularly constructed on his own life experiences, good and bad times, and all having a structure that can be simply regarded as poetic prose.
Ħolm... tal-bieraħ u tal-lum, his latest novel, transcends his previous ones with singular cri de coeur that comes not only from an author’s pen but from the heart of a poet embittered by the angst of reality, by the sweet-sadness of nostalgia and the excruciating pain of the inevitable tragedies of life.
The book, neatly printed by Horizons, with an endearing very attractive front cover, opens with two short critical studies by Maria Camilleri, a novelist herself and a popular broadcaster on Radju Malta, and poet Emmanuel Attard Cassar, President of Assoċjazzjoni EspRimi.
Salv Sammut has been prolifically active in the writing of the Maltese novel for many years
Camilleri delves deeply into what forms the general structure of the story, the various situations that increasingly come up in today’s societies, such as homosexuality, child abuse, infidelity in marriage and other aberrations that indubitably do nothing else but increase the rot and intensify the inevitable decadence.
Attard Cassar adds more to Camilleri’s look upon Sammut’s dramatic scenario, both seeing in him the spectator over the past; they echo his nostalgic pain as his dreams revert back to the past, his tireless efforts as he tries desperately to warn of the awful consequences of the present on the future... here the poet in the author excels.
The novel, in fact, opens with a beautiful poem, a tiny prelude that raises the curtain over one of the most touching novels I have ever read. What comes next is highly gripping, tense, dramatic, very often screaming crude reality in the reader’s face, with short intervals of respite here and there. Dreams and reality struggle on, for supremacy, as the poet’s sensitivity sometimes reaches breaking point.
And, after the finale, yet another beautiful short poem, a tiny epilogue that brings down the curtain on yet another dream, depicting reality beyond it and hope hovering aimlessly in the spaces of nowhere!
Ħolm... tal-bieraħ u tal-lum is, like all of Sammut’s other novels, emotionally poetic, steadfastly and relentlessly set on depicting reality as it is, hitting mercilessly at what is objectively wrong and immoral, at what actually degenerates humanity and, hopefully, pleading desperately for something to be done, in time, while things continue to get out of hand and the tragedy continues.