Appreciation : Paul Spiteri (1954-2011)

Abstract

Leafing through this newspaper on Monday 31st January, I was provided with a great shock. I came across the notification that a great friend of mine of the last thirty years had breathed his last. I had called to speak to him the very same Saturday evening he was to die, only to be told by his father in law that Paul Spiteri had been in hospital for the entire week. The huge crowd that thronged Ta’ Kercem’s Parish Church for the funeral mass, that Monday evening, attested to Paul’s great popularity. For years he had been teaching literature, the subject which was so close to his heart and which he seemed to embody in various aspects of his life. He taught literature not just to generations of secondary and sixth form students in Malta and Gozo but well beyond the confines of the classroom. He taught literature to the many friends and acquaintances who shared his company. He had an all consuming passion for the subject in its international dimensions. The main celebrant at his funeral mass summarized Paul’s passion for reading great literature when referring to the fact that, in his final period, Paul not only read the Book of Job but virtually memorized the entire text. That in a nutshell was Paul’s relationship to literature. He would read (intensively) not just one text by Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Toni Morrison or George Steiner, to name but a few, but, in many cases, these authors’ almost entire oeuvre. There are few persons I have come across who demonstrated such a broad and deep understanding of the subject. Paul Spiteri can easily stake a claim to being one of the best literary connoisseurs our university never had - I mean as a full time academic staff member.