Book 189: Malta (English) – In the Name of the Father (and of the Son) (Immanuel MIFSUD)

At the Addolorata cemetery. On your mother’s grave. From behind the thick, dark lenses of your glasses, I saw the tear trickling down. It shouldn’t have done that, but it did; it just welled up and trickled down. You thought I hadn’t noticed anything, but I was watching you. I was always watching you, always keeping an eye on you, to see how you’d behave.

This novella by Malta’s best writer may be slim but it is dense with ideas and writing, so not as easy to read as it appears. But it’s worth a second reading.

The story is apparently based on fact, although it’s hard to know how much was fictionalised, with Mifsud finding a diary that his deceased father had kept during WWII. This sets him to seeking the man he really was.

The narrator’s relationship with his father was awestruck but distant and lacking in understanding. So he finally only begins to understand him after his death. The meditation on masculinity and being a father, which the author added to his father’s diary, is very profound for so few pages. For example, the father thinks that men shouldn’t cry, but quickly comes to realise that men, even soldiers, do indeed cry. I got the impression that Malta is a very macho society, but many of the issues will apply to any society or to some families everywhere. As he becomes a father himself, the son begins to understand better where his father was coming from.

As usual for me with stories with flashbacks, I occasionally got confused as to where I was in time.

Although I can’t read the original Maltese, Albert Gatt’s translation seems to be brilliant, it really reads as if it was originally written in English.

This is a brave personal revelation on the part of the author. Since few of us are fortunate enough to receive such a ‘time capsule’ from a deceased person, we must be condemned to have seen only the tip of the iceberg and to know little of what made them what they were (or us what we are).

It won the European Prize for Literature.

Mifsud, Immanuel (1967 – ), In the Name of the Father (& of the Son), translated from Maltese by Albert Gatt, Cardigan, Parthian, 2019, ISBN 978-1-912681-330-3