Joe Friggieri has been writing and publishing literature for almost six decades. He has always seemed to enjoy shorter forms of writing. Most of his poetry is short, and includes volumes of the quintessentially short poem form, the haiku. He has also been writing short stories since his youth, although the first collections of stories were only published in the 1990s.

The short stories in this volume are really short, as if the author feels an urgency to transmit an essential narrative in the most efficient way he possibly can. The longest is less than nine small pages long; most are much shorter. Those who are looking for detailed character descriptions will not find them here. For example in Slot machines there are two characters. One is simply described (or should I say defined) as a Moroccan man. As in Maltese all nouns are gendered, he only needs one word to do that. The context does the rest. The opening sentence had informed us that we were in a European city on a cold day. The other person in the story is described simply as rough, and wearing a tight-fitting cap. That's five words in Maltese. Because no reference is made to his nationality, we have to assume he is a local. A handful of words not only tells us who the characters are, but also explains the relationship between them, information that then leads to the climax of the story.

Friggieri is indeed a master of this genre. There is not one story in this collection that disappoints. Even the ones which seem at first pointless or unoriginal hide a deeper layer. Take Ponn Ramel. The four-page story reads like an enjoyable encyclopaedia entry, if encyclopaedia entries were written by someone like Friggieri, that is. We get to know who the Sybils were in antiquity and focus on one of them in particular. Then, when the narrative seems to be fizzling out as the necessary information has been delivered, we suddenly realise the story was not about the sybils at all, but about problems that in antiquity only existed as myths but are very real in our own world.

The themes of the stories in the collection vary from travelling, to love, to the passage of time and memory loss. However, the notion that Friggieri most often brings into play is that of writing itself. The first story in the collection, and the one which gives the book its title, Bejn Storja u Oħra, is a manifesto for the writing of fiction. Its parting shot is, Hemm stejjer li jitwemmnu, u oħrajn li ma jitwemmnux (some stories you can believe, others are incredible). Whether a story is credible or not is not an evaluation of its truthfulness. In fact, in Maltese, when we declare that something is incredible (ma titwemminx), we generally use the expression to emphasise that it has really happened. This is the contradiction that the author plays with when he claims that the story he is about to tell is a true one, just after he has warned us that we should not really believe the stories told in novels and short stories. He claims that his story is true even though he himself struggles to accept that it really happened. What follows does not make it easier. The narrator is a librarian, someone who lives among books, and does not seem to have a life beyond the library. And the object that should prove that the story really happened is itself a book, an autobiography that the narrator does not have the means to declare truthful or otherwise. The development of the story takes us into the ambiguous region where life can intrude on fiction and the other way round. However, as a reviewer I cannot continue discussing this extremely well-written story without spoiling the reader's enjoyment of it. You have to trust me as you would an author who claims the story he's about to tell you is true (I think I might be getting carried away here). Storytelling, and its relationship to the truth, returns several times in the collection, whether it is in relation to local legends or to classic literature. And, as if to close the circle, the last story in the book refers to one of the greatest storytellers in history, Jesus Christ. A monk, whose devotion is shared between his faith and his garden, finds it difficult to accept that Christ cursed the fig tree simply because it was not bearing fruit when he passed by, when it was not the time of year to bear fruit anyway. The monk spends a good part of his life looking after the only fig tree in his garden, which, like the one in the Bible, refuses to bear fruit, and another part of his life rereading the episode in the Gospel to see if he has missed any hidden meaning. The resolution of the problem takes us back to the relation between truth and fiction.

As always, Friggieri's fiction makes for effortless and enjoyable reading. And yet, interwoven into the simplicity of these short narratives are deep truths that linger with us long after we have finished reading the book.

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