Lino Spiteri – Fiction and politics

My comment about Lino Spiteri for Malta Today.

From a literary point of view, Lino Spiteri leaves behind him a wealth of fiction, especially his early novel Rivoluzzjoni do Minore (1980) and short stories like “Riħ il-Ħamsin,” a piece of unrelenting prose that investigates the life of a married couple in their fifties. His literary figure and work allow us to reflect on the relationship between fiction and politics, especially in the case of those writers, in Malta and beyond, who are also politicians. They seem to have an advantage over other writers because of their privileged access to the (under)world of politics. But they are also, inevitably, immersed in that world. The great challenge they face, I suppose, is to narrate it both from the inside, and from the outside. That can’t be easy.