Apart from his political life and career, former premier Alfred Sant is undoubtedly one of Malta's most prolific writers, with his literary output ranging from full scale novels, collections of essays and, like this present book, a collection of short stories.

Apart from this versatility on the wider scale, this volume shows a more varied versatility between the different stories the book is composed of.

The first story that opens the volume is It-Tmenin Anniversarju, a leisurely ramble in an unidentified Maltese village, a universe to the people of the village,  polarized around two feuding and rivaling band clubs, both dedicated to saints but equally ready to wage war without exclusion of weapons.

There are also the members of the professional classes at the top of the respective clubs but they may also have wider ambitions, tending to see the small world politics as a stepping stone on their way to national politics.

The next story, Joyce u Klara, may be interesting to those who know their Sant. It tells of a young university student interviewing a Grande Dame of Maltese theatre. But it is a throwback, I believe, to one of Dr Sant's most celebrated novels Silg fuq Kemmuna which treats about a group of students in the late 1960s, including a group blossoming into theatre putting up the first Brecht in Malta. And one of these young persons, one of the protagonists of the book is Klara. Here, in this short story Klara has aged and is one of Malta's Grandes Dames.

The book also includes short stories that are very different from these realistic short stories. Il-Leggenda ta' Saraha u Rahim is about a people lost in the mists of the past, a desert people who find that a deep and unbridgeable feud has crept in their midst. Mill-gholi gives us the prototype of that German Wings pilot who crashed his plane in the Alps. Here a recluse dreams up an equally tragic action on unsuspecting people on the beach under the shadow of a cliff.

Fossa Nuova takes us back in history to 1272 and Reginald of Piperno, a disciple and colleague of Thomas Aquinas.

As its name implies, Grajja Gotika tells us about a man, Carabott, who stops taking his medication, and flies away to a Spanish island in search of his beloved Katja. Is she real or is she a mirage?

Cpar, the last novel and the one that gives its name to the book, takes us to Dr Sant's present habitat, Brussels. There have been a number of books originating from the Brussels scene - one remembers Guze Stagno's book. But Dr Sant's treatment of the Brussels scene is more toned down, less outrageous and, in my opinion, more realistic in that it faces the personal traumas and complicated life that living in a foreign metropolis poses to a island race that for centuries has preferred to stay at home.