Sajf
by Ryan Falzon
I wonder if there’s any other European country, apart from Malta, where students have close to three months off school – from the end of June to (nearly) the end of September. This period coincides with the hottest and balmiest weeks of the year – an ideal time for lazing around, spending days at the beach and evenings grilling pink sausages and burgers on the barbecue and, if you’re part of the festa crowd, watching fireworks and jumping to band marches at the feast of the village patron saint.
All this makes of the long Maltese summer holidays a childhood idyll which keeps haunting your memory into adulthood and beyond. Of course, it’s not as if summers end when you grow up. But the time to enjoy them does. That is, unless you are a teacher...
Before I’m misunderstood – coming from a family of teachers, and having had many inspirational teachers over the years, I would quickly point out that I have utmost respect for this honourable profession. I am also aware that dedicated teachers keep working over the summer, not only by preparing coursework for the coming terms, but particularly if they are also involved in administration, such as setting time-tables and syllabi. This, despite the fact, that the salaries they earn are hardly commensurate with their responsibilities and efforts.
But, yes, there is indeed a widely-held perception that teachers are the only profession allowed to live on that childhood fever-dream that is the Maltese summer. And the protagonist of Ryan Falzon’s Sajf ("Summer") certainly does.
Sajf is Falzon’s debut novel. Its action takes place over the course of one crazy, hedonistic summer, the last prior the onset of the Covid pandemic. Its setting is therefore clearly identifiable, and it provides an ironic and sometimes caustic snapshot of contemporary Maltese society.
The novel’s unnamed narrator is a twenty/thirty-something male Physics teacher in a secondary school who, probably much like his students, is determined to make the most of the summer holidays. Preparing notes for next year, reading emails circulated by the head... those are hardly his priorities. Instead, he tinkers round with his cars, especially his beloved BMW, spends booze-fuelled nights with women met through Tinder, while yearning after Sarah, his friend/soulmate/sex-buddy with whom he has a – let’s call it “complicated” – on-again-off-again relationship.
Falzon’s protagonist is both Everyman and anti-hero. He’s a middle-of-the-road man-in-the-street who’s far from perfect, but still elicits the reader’s sympathy. He is, one feels, a decent chap – a fact evident when he mentions his students, whom he clearly respects and cares for, or when he speaks about Sarah with whom he is, in his own peculiar way, in love. He is no intellectual, but he is definitely intelligent and capable of insightful observations about himself and society. He can be maddeningly superficial, but also surprisingly deep.
In many respects, in his debut novel, Ryan Falzon comes across as the (spiritual?!?) heir of Ġużè Stagno. Sajf has the same pop sensibility of Stagno’s novels (the use of the vernacular; the references to contemporary popular culture) and shares with them a desire to shock (be prepared for gratuitous profanities and raw, explicit sex). The narration is similarly “confessional” and direct, almost diary-like, with brief, page-turning hurrying the action along. Interestingly, Falzon repeatedly incorporates “lists” in the text – a stylistic peculiarity which is certainly original, at times irritating, at others surprisingly lyrical.
Stagno chronicles Malta of the nineties and noughties, and in his dark, cynical 2013 comedy What happens in Brussels stays in Brussels (currently, alas his latest – but hopefully not last, novel) sends up the early years of Malta’s EU membership. A decade later, Falzon portrays a different Malta – a society run over by rampant capitalism; a society where streets are clogged with traffic and development is untamed; a society which has abandoned faith and proudly become secular, yet hangs on to the cultural remnants of its Catholic roots (such as festas and baptism) as long as they continue to provide opportunities for partying, booze and cocaine. It is a portrait which is funny, but also sobering, and, frankly, frightening. And, if I have a criticism of Sajf, it’s that – as I have commented elsewhere on Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Sleep and Relaxation – the vacuity which the novel exposes sometimes rubs off on the work itself, which by the end becomes rather repetitive and tiring. Nonetheless, it is a work which heralds an interesting new voice on the Maltese scene.
Sajf is published by Kotba
Calleja and sports their characteristic “house style” – minimalist design and
high-quality paper and finish. The
volume is beautiful to own, hold and admire, if somewhat at odds with the neon-lit,
in-your-face novel hidden between its covers.
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