PRESS RELEASE
Horizons Publications are all set to
publish Mario Azzopardi’s latest collection of edgy short stories aimed at
young adult readers. This publishing house has been steadily gaining a
reputation for quality publishing and this is the second book by Mario
Azzopardi it’s bringing out.
Arrestingly titled Vampir, this collection extends the
hard-hitting themes Mario Azzopardi dealt with in his previous short stories
for young adults. The title story itself plays on the current fad with
phantasmagoric creatures to present a fresh take on the media’s invidious
manipulation. Employing a highly satirical tone, Azzopardi tells the story of a
mechanized German vampire who doesn’t lose his cool when confronted by a
vociferous group of viewers opposed to his TV appearance. The programme’s
producers sense the mood in an instant and have no qualms in turning matters to
their advantage.
This collections ventures further
than the earlier ones in its exploration of thorny teenage preoccupations.
Whereas Azzopardi has earlier dealt sensitively with a teenage boy’s and girl’s
first sexual contact, in this volume he dares to take on the much darker theme
of sexual crime. Readers are invited to reach their own conclusions in a story
that intertwines rape and incest written from a young college student’s point
of view. Azzopardi’s style is light, reflecting the language teens speak, and yet
provocation is never far from the surface. However, this isn’t provocation for
its own sake; rather it stimulates thought on difficult life situations at a
time when we are being constantly assailed by overt sexual imagery in the media
and an increasingly constricting politically correct attitude in public life.
Adolescents are getting some very mixed messages indeed.
Rape is also explored from a
different angle: this time as a weapon of war. Charter Flight is a story that seems to have been inspired by
occasional newspaper reports of migrants who are given permanent residence
status in other European countries. Azzopardi takes to task the jaunty
depiction of a better future, uncovering hypocritical attitudes that have no
respect for tragedies of unimaginable suffering.
Other stories deal with a posse of
alienated teenagers, an intriguingly human depiction of Christ as a teenager,
fake celebrity culture, rootlessness, loneliness and a retelling of the fairytale
of the frog prince for a generation that’s technologically savvy but might have
been shortchanged where the primacy of the imagination is concerned.
The fact that these stories have been
written in Maltese seems to be purely incidental. Azzopadi evokes both the
Maltese locale and foreign ones with consummate ease. His set of questing
teenage characters have long ago abandoned any considerations of nationality.
Their deepest desire is to try and make sense of themselves and the world they
live in. We can all relate to that.
ENDS.