It-Tfal Jigu bil-Vapuri : or how to depict a country through a novel

Abstract

Why should people take a novel seriously when it is formally defined as 'fiction', namely as the product of imagination, a figment of mental creativity? As a matter of fact, many do not, and it may be all due to the type of approach they have had to literature in general. Literature is frequently associated with the acquisition of competence in a particular language, whereas it is infinitely more than that, and it is not that at all if that is not just the minimum, the basis on which a whole edifice must be constructed. I have been dedicating my life to writing since I was about ten or eleven. My earliest preference was poetry, which I wrote avidly, and regularly, and with an ever increasing desire to attain technical and logical coherence. Then, steeped in my philosophical studies, came literary criticism, which is supposed to be a science like any other, equally esteemed and equally abused since literary judgement of any sort and merit is supposedly an instinctive mood any reader goes through without conscious deliberation. The reaction of the reader is, of course, the things which concerns me most as a novelist. [excerpt]