"In the Name of the Father (and of the Son)" by Immanuel Mifsud

Fl-Isem tal-Missier (u tal-Iben) 

by Immanuel Mifsud

A review

In 2006, the author was present at the birth of his son. Just a few months later, in 2007, the author’s father died.  These two momentous events, which he lived as a father and as a son, led Immanuel Mifsud to write Fl-Isem tal-Missier (u tal-Iben) (later translated into several languages, including English as “In the Name of the Father (and of the Son)”). Another source of inspiration for the author was the discovery of a “war diary”that his father started to write when he joined the King’s Own Malta Regiment in 1939.  Brief extracts from the diary are included in the text and the image of Mifsud’s father as “soldier”, in both a literal and figurative sense is a running theme of this short book.

Immanuel Mifsud is best-known as the writer of short stories which break taboos by focussing on less savoury aspects of Maltese society.  Fl-Isem tal-Missier (U tal-Iben), for which Mifsud won the European Literature Prize in 2011, is not very typical of the author. One could say that it is also quite an unusual sort of work in the Maltese literary context.  More than a novel, I would describe it as a meditation on fatherhood – a Sebaldian mix of essay, autobiography and (possibly?) fiction, rendered in a highly poetic prose.  It is also, very evidently, a personal project close to the author’s heart.

Tellingly, in its introduction, Mifsud voices his concern, via a reference to Roland Barthes, that this book, completed as a “promise” might not speak to its readers as it does to him.  This observation is well-placed. The searing emotion of the text is often moving but sometimes made me feel uncomfortably like a voyeur.    

Paperback, 80 pages

Published 2010 by Klabb Kotba Maltin