The latest edition of the National Book Prize ended with no winner in the novels section. The judges felt that “the overall literary quality fell short of the expectations for a national award”. Does this mean there is a crisis of the book industry in Malta? Yes.
But it is also a crisis of Culture (with a big ‘C’). Malta has embraced neoliberalism and the socio-economic model to which neoliberalism serves as philosophy (namely, globalisation). To such an extent that the local human experience fails to capture local (collective or individual) imaginations.
Nowadays, the globalised atomised person who speaks ‘globish’ and is severed from the family is the protagonist of human experience. It is said that the first psychological novel in Maltese was Il-Gaġġa; it seems to me that Malta’s last novel was last year’s Book Prize winner. It attacked the family and the patriarchy that, according to its author, is willed and promoted by the Catholic Church.
Needless to say, this analysis is flimsy. More significant is that it seems like we’ve reached the end of (Maltese) literature. Ironically – even paradoxically – the solution lies in globalisation, the very phenomenon that gave rise to the crisis in the first place.
The local book industry has to start thinking big, almost globally. The late Pawlu Mizzi – always the visionary – had proposed something on these lines during the last years of the Lawrence Gonzi administration. Fifteen years or so have passed.