Holm tal-bierah u tal-lum
Author: Salv Sammut
Publisher: Horizons / 2023
Pages: 212

It is a pity that the publishers gave this book a misleading title and an irrelevant front cover. It is also sad that they did not see fit to list somewhere the quite considerable oeuvre by this writer.

The book's storyline focuses around three generations of the same family from their distant origin in the small Gozitan village of Kercem, or to give it its formal name today Ta' Kercem, through the first generation and finishing in the third generation, which we might call the Millennials.

Each generation has its own cross to bear. To start from the lower level the Millennials, two cousins experience the growing up pangs common to their generation with an added question regarding their own sexuality.

On the one hand the boy-girl relationship could be replaced by a (non-sexual) girl-girl one. One also notes the breakdown of the Maltese language and its increased substitution by English words and sentences.

Their parents, the second generation, can have their own problems, from sexual harassment at work to a long-term story of adultery.

Somehow the successive generations come to realise there is an underlying mystery coming from Kercem, which has affected them all.

The catalyst that blows the whole family up is the reappearance of a fellow citizen from Kercem who had been living as a successful migrant in Canada and who wants to transfer to Malta the experience (and the money) he made over there.

The characters are sympathetically drawn up - from Wigi, the paterfamilias, and Lucija his wife, to their daughters, Becky and Suzanne, and then their daughters Michaela and Stefania.

Nevertheless the story that is told is rather a sad one albeit with a sort of happy ending. The reaction of a closed and backward society exemplified by Kercem can still reach out through the generations and bedevil people's lives.

There is no clear conclusion except the rather prosaic one that time passes and time heals.