'Fjura tas-Sabbara, Fjura tax-Xadina'

Author: Irene Chias

Publisher: Klabb Kotba Maltin / 2023

Pages: 182

 

This is the second book by this author that is being reviewed on these pages.

The first was actually the second book by her, Esercizi di sevizia e seduzione (Mondadori 2013) which won the Premio Mondello Opera Italiana and Premio Mondello Giovani. It was translated into Maltese by Mark Vella and published as Mur Gibek (Horizons 2022).

The book being reviewed today is actually her fourth book and was published by Laurana in 2020 as Fiore d'agave, fiore di scimmia. In this case too, the book has been translated to Maltese by Mark Vella.

The author, Irene Chias, was born in Sicily and now lives in Malta. The first book I referred to is set in and around Milan but the book being reviewed today takes us back to the author's birthplace, Sicily.

Apart from a science-fiction coda, about which more later, the book is about an aspiring writer, Adelaide, who goes back to the roots of her family to research the background of her intended protagonist, Adelasia.

The focus is Sant'Angelo Musciaro in the Sicilian hinterland, a village where time stood still, centred around the church and the piazza with a bar where only males congregate.

Adelaide, the researcher, is hosted in the huge and rambling family home and told to look for a paper left by her grandmother, Adelasia.

She looks everywhere for this paper, which may have implications in hereditary issues but this paper proves to be impossible to find.

Instead, she finds two, not one, diaries left by two unfortunate ancestors. They tell sad stories of love given and not returned.

This, in a way, sheds light on the life of Adelaide especially when her longtime boyfriend Simone turns up.

Adelaide is struck too by the backward social conditions of this small town in Sicily with high unemployment, neglect and lack of opportunity.

But the main problem is love and the heartache it brings. For a writer urged by her publisher to explore the feminist point of view the two stories come together.

The sci-fi coda, I said. There is a strain of primates, known as bonobos, who are far more akin to humans than one thinks. Maybe, thinking ahead and speculating, the way ahead for a weakened humanity may lie this way just as another planet might one day offer a more hospitable environment.