Dr Clare Thake Vassallo, senior lecturer in English at the University of Malta, will be giving a talk on Malta and Memory in the Second War as depicted in four novels by British and American writers.

The talk will be held at St James Cavalier on Thursday at 6.30pm

Despite being works of fiction, these novels present us with an insight into life in Malta during the war years which comes dramatically close to a kind of ‘truth’, a kind of veracity that art is capable of creating. A fascinating blending of ‘real’ characters, dates, places and events share the pages with the fictional, creating a memory that is both true and untrue at one and the same time.

Each story is set against the extraordinary event of Malta under blitz. The fictional characters are tangled within the contorted wreckage of the island: the massive scale of destruction, the heaps of masonry, the rock hewn shelters and the daily deaths through repeated bombing. Intricacies of plot and character are played out in various familiar areas of Malta which include Valletta, Sliema and Ta’ Qali.

The artistic focus on Valletta and the Second World War is further developed in connection with a forthcoming exhibition of paintings by the artist Madeline Gera entitled Eloise Halberd Valletta 1940-1942- 2007. A selection of these paintings, in which Valletta is protagonist, will be pre-viewed in the slides which will accompany the talk.

This talk is based on a paper in the recently published book Malta at War in Cultural Memory: Representations of the ‘Madonna’s Chosen People’, Edited by Clare Thake Vassallo and Ivan Callus, published by University Publishers Ltd and distributed by Books Distributors Ltd., BDL.

The novels discussed in the talk are Thomas Pynchon’s V (1963), Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Kapillan of Malta (1973), Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers (1980), and Nicholas Rinaldi’s The Juke-Box Queen of Malta (1999).