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The Maltese Baron... and I Lucian
A posthumous novel that can be considered a twin of A Requiem for a Malta Fascist (1980) with which it shares several similarities in terms of theme and style. Both novels discuss fascism and the Second World War.
276 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2002
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About the author
Francis Ebejer
22 books4 followersFrancis Ebejer was born in 1925 and was a novelist and playwright writing in both English and Maltese.
He has written plays for the stage, television and radio.
He has travelled widely. At age seventeen-and-a-half he worked for a year (1943-44) in North Africa with the British Eighth Army as an English-Italian interpreter.
Requiem for a Malta Fascist (or The Interrogation) is his fifth English published novel.
He has written plays for the stage, television and radio.
He has travelled widely. At age seventeen-and-a-half he worked for a year (1943-44) in North Africa with the British Eighth Army as an English-Italian interpreter.
Requiem for a Malta Fascist (or The Interrogation) is his fifth English published novel.
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June 10, 2011
The Maltese Baron… and I Lucian is my book from Malta for the Read The World challenge. It’s a novel narrated by an old man called Lucian which begins with the return after decades of his childhood friend, the Baron. It is the story of their fractious relationship, and Lucian’s relationship with a woman called Katarina, cutting back and forth between the present and their youth.
It has quite a successful unreliable narrator thing going on — Lucian portrays himself as an upright, moral, dignified man in contrast to the Baron’s promiscuity and vulgarity, whereas we can see that he’s a pompous selfish prick, and that the Baron, despite a few flaws, is practically heroic in comparison.
Otherwise, though, it doesn’t have much going for it. The opening chapter has some prose which is so convoluted that it was practically incomprehensible, and I initially couldn’t tell whether this was supposed to be a way of characterising the narrator, some kind of advanced literary technique that I just wasn’t grokking, or just very badly written. In the end I decided it was a combination: Ebejer was trying to characterise Lucian as stuffy and self-important, but just wasn’t quite good enough to pull it off. The main narrative is more readable, most of the time, but it’s never any better than ordinary.
It has quite a successful unreliable narrator thing going on — Lucian portrays himself as an upright, moral, dignified man in contrast to the Baron’s promiscuity and vulgarity, whereas we can see that he’s a pompous selfish prick, and that the Baron, despite a few flaws, is practically heroic in comparison.
Otherwise, though, it doesn’t have much going for it. The opening chapter has some prose which is so convoluted that it was practically incomprehensible, and I initially couldn’t tell whether this was supposed to be a way of characterising the narrator, some kind of advanced literary technique that I just wasn’t grokking, or just very badly written. In the end I decided it was a combination: Ebejer was trying to characterise Lucian as stuffy and self-important, but just wasn’t quite good enough to pull it off. The main narrative is more readable, most of the time, but it’s never any better than ordinary.
Displaying 1 of 1 review