It’s my old trabokk [...] I came upon it two days ago in your father’s barn. I had it given to me once, long ago, when I was a kid. [...] I set it only a few times; never caught anything. Then my father came to know about it; he considered I was wasting my time, precious time. Somehow it’s always been precious, my time, can you believe it?
the Maltese writer Francis Ebejer’s novel In the Eye of the Sun is a short, enigmatic meditation on memory, education, and class, following a young man, Joseph, who has recently abandoned medical school on the eve of his graduation, to the chagrin of everyone around him, in pursuit of uncertain memories and unrealized possibilities from his childhood. as the novel progresses, we get glimpses of incidents from Joseph’s past alongside the disintegration of his relationships with people in the present — friends, girlfriend, family, coworkers, mentors — as he returns not only to the village he grew up in but to his childhood house, now inhabited by a family of strangers who agree to rent him his old room. it is a book about the weight of expectation, about “happiness” as a social pressure.
for such a pensive novel I enjoyed how much of it is dialogue — but dialogue that’s sparse, evasive, oblique. characters are often talking past each other, especially when Joseph is involved but even when talking among themselves. this is perhaps most pronounced in Joseph’s conversations with Karla, a girl he becomes involved with, the daughter of the family that now lives in his childhood home. their relationship exists in a liminal space between her hoped-for matriculation at the university (where she, too, intends to study medicine) and Joseph’s quest to recapture his childhood, and their often inconclusive, tense conversations emphasize the distances between them — emotional, experiential, gendered, and otherwise. it is also clear that on some level Joseph conceives of Karla as a substitute for his aunt, the one person in his childhood who seemed to care about what he actually wanted rather than what she expected him to want.
“sparse, evasive, oblique” describes much of the novel’s prose. while occasionally it feels a bit awkward, at other times Ebejer produces striking turns of phrase: “In the vast hiatus of his thoughts and feelings, Joseph walked like a stranger in the very land he loved.” if I were going to compare it to anyone, I would say Le Guin or perhaps the McKillip of the Riddle-Master trilogy.
one particularly striking scene is Joseph’s conversation-confrontation with his old schoolteacher at the midpoint of the novel. his teacher tries to bring Joseph back into the world he imagined for his student by reminding him of the poetry they used to read (all Italian; Malta’s colonial history is doubly inscribed here). his teacher speaks of love poems and “The white women [...] The great white women of the world’s greatest works”, unwittingly hitting on, precisely, one of Joseph’s own preoccupations: the whiteness of his (now ex-)girlfriend’s skin has begun to disgust him, signaling for him not “purity” (of race or of class) but unreality:
Joseph flung the soil violently against the cistern wall. ‘The brocaded dresses, you say,’ he said harshly. ‘Their cultivated poise, their mind, their spirit!...Sickening! I say it was the body that was brown under the skin and smelled of earth and weed, the body draped by the most ordinary material, the thighs that shook as primitively as a panther’s in mating, the breasts burning with a fire no cultivated poise or exquisite mannerism could kindle...that is what inspired the masters, earth itself, all the lasting things civilized society is intent on destroying...Not just the skin, their mind, their spirit, as you...as you, schoolmaster, as you would have me...’ He stopped, groping for breath.
When he went on, his voice was low but bitter. ‘I used to see these white women of those long evenings at your house, but always from afar off. When I got to the town, I thought I would find them near. I did. For a time I thought I had found our white women, schoolmaster. But I didn’t – not in your sense, not as I, under your influence, had decided to find them. Slowly I discovered what the great masters really meant.’
the schoolteacher’s response is disgust: “Peasants. [...] We are trying to leave all that behind, my boy. To lift ourselves from it and all its connotations. Transcend its baseness, its vileness, its pettiness.” there’s something to unpack here, I think, about the pursuit of whiteness and the layers of Malta’s colonial history. it’s perhaps worth noting that while Ebejer mainly wrote novels in English, he was apparently one of the most prominent Maltese-language dramatists of the twentieth century, and he was born in 1925, almost a decade before Maltese was made co-official with English and only four years after the colony was granted self-government.
and yet there is uncertainty in this moment, because Joseph’s words are, by his own recognition, driven by “[a]n indescribable urge to hurt” — not necessarily by any sense of truth. we are left with an open question, whether Joseph genuinely believes this mix of rejection of aristocratic-bourgeois (and racial) norms and embrace of an essentialist primitivism that links women with earth or land, or whether he’s simply saying this because he wants to break the schoolmaster’s ties to him — and so hold over him — and knows this will be the most efficient way to do so. indeed, later he’s unable to remember what either he or the schoolteacher said.
as the novel progresses it becomes clear that part of what is distancing Joseph from the people around him is his unwillingness to engage with women as people with their own thoughts, feelings, and desires. when Yvonne — his girlfriend in the city — and later Karla express an independent desire or emotion, he becomes angry; when Karla tells him she loves him, he thinks: “How small! Where was the woman he had desired?” forced to reckon with her as a person, all he can do is shout and then deny her: “You understand nothing.” if anything about this is surprising, it is that Yvonne and Karla are both so willing to accommodate him. (it is, though, I will grant, an interesting change of pace that Joseph is willing to upend his own life by going back into medical training in order to get Karla to conform to his vision of her (since she insists she doesn’t want to go to university because she doesn’t want to be away from him).)
ultimately, when Joseph is confronted by the gap between the aunt of his childhood memories and the unknowable reality of his aunt as a person in her own right, he becomes delirious. when he recovers — sort of — he finds that even Karla is gone, dead in a maybe-accident that’s at least partly his fault, and his sense of time and self collapses entirely, throwing him, finally, back into the memory the reader has had glimpses of since early in the novel, a traumatic memory of World War II that he has held unspoken since childhood. the prose in this memory, and in the sequence of madness that follows it, is exhilarating:
Whimper, probe dark, scratch stone, round and round, caged, hunters close in, they’re here, nowhere to go but to her, and God she isn’t God she isn’t here at all.
after this the actual ending — which is to say, the last two pages, is almost an anticlimax. the exhilaration fades, and we are left — disappointed and then ashamed of our disappointment — with nothing more than an ordinary, pointless tragedy. exquisite.
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