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| Lowlife Tales by M G Sanchez |
January is normally a good time to set goals, as much for writing as for any other part of life. This year, I was so beset with the flu at the start of the year that all that new resolutions stuff totally passed my by. We are well into January (it is now Burns Night as I write this) and I still haven't recovered my voice, much to the Family's delight. So, because it is usually easier to swim with the current than against it, I decided to throw goals out with the bathwater and just indulge in reading more.
It makes sense, I suppose, and I have advocated it to those young writers that I have mentored over the years, that if you want to continuously improve your writing, you have to read and read and read, and write and write and write. I tend to be quite an avid reader anyway, but last year I noticed that I was reading more slowly, I noticed a reluctance to read more than a few pages at a time and instead I would listen to music, daydream, watch TV and doomscroll. I have decided to change that this year, but to change it with a specific purpose in mind. Because it is not so much quantity of reading as quality that counts and this year I have decided that I am going to focus on reading as much Gibraltarian literature as I can, and get a real feel of how local writing is developing.
There is no shortage these days of books produced by local writers, which is joyful, starting with the Patuka Press' December 2025 launch of its latest edition, Childhood. This was an utter joy to read, and I have reviewed it in my Substack channel, link below:
Jackie's Substack: Childhoods Revisted
So I have kicked off my January reading with M G Sanchez' Lowlife Tales, the Llanito dialogue edition. I'm a sucker for a short story collection and have Hernandez' books, Mis Patios Perdidos and 4-volume Historias de Gibraltar on my shelves, alongside Rebecca Calderon's Ten Thousand Words. I did have Sanchez' Rock Black: Ten Gibraltarian Stories, but as I type these words I am suffering the supreme irritation of not finding it on the bookshelf with my other Gibraltarian books which means I have probably lent it out, never got it back and I can't even remember who I've lent it to. How infuriating! That particular collection of short stories was my first introduction to any Gibraltarian writer and Sanchez' dark humour and his talent for drawing realistic yet unique characters that are so recognisable as LLanitos instantly appealed, especially as when this was released in 2008, there was nothing like this available, nothing that was as basic as one of us writing about...us.
Lowlife Tales are a welcome addition to Sanchez' catalogue of work that tells uniquely Gibraltarian stories. Yet, as I write those words, I am acutely aware that this collection is much more than that. I am not a literary critic, or an academic, but even I can tell that this collection achieves something far more important than simply to draw interesting characters, or give them realistic stories in a familiar setting using familiar words as their speech. Sanchez' characters are complex and their experiences are universal. He doesn't hold back in laying out their physical flaws and failings, their weaknesses, which we all have; even the most bombastic of smugglers have hidden weaknesses lurking somewhere in their psyche, such as Toni Metetrola's fear of the open sea. I think, however, that Sanchez has a real knack of exploring and exposing men's mentality and mental health; he puts the reader easily into his characters' heads, and creates a ready engagement with the anxieties, fears, paranoias and other experiences that beset his characters. The journey in a character's mindset as it changes over the course of the story is smoothly laid out, carried as you are through a narrative style that is unobtrusive, that lays the story out almost as if you were listening to a group of men gossiping en el martillo. That the writer manages to write himself out of a text and allows the characters to tell their stories with minimum intrusion speaks of a tremendous skill. One of the many reasons why Gibraltarian writers need to read texts like this to be able to enhance their own writing skills. Should this text be studied at the local comprehensive schools? I'll let you ponder that.
Besides character and story building, Sanchez' stories depict a Gibraltar that if it were left to those other than local artists to depict, would be lost in the far recesses of history never to be thought about again. It is especially true of a small and enclosed society such as Gibraltar's to try to hide the flaws, to cover up the darker, seamier, side of life, and yet, Gibraltar's continuously evolving story is no more than a pastiche of light and dark tales, and our 'low-life' tales are as much a part of our history and our culture as stories to do with economic success or military strategic importance.This is because it is the 'low-life' from where we all come, which touches us all, which has shaped us and will continue to shape us, because we are nothing more than a balancing act between dark and light. Take for instance the fact that Sanchez does not shy away from the nastier aspects of the Gibraltarian character, such as the horrific misogynistic attitudes that women endure:
"Jeremy watched her with a furrowed brow, pained by the thought that she could be hearing their lewd sexual banter. It was a feeling that he knew only too well, this mixture of guilt, shame, disgust, discomfort and stinging inadequacy that always took hold of him when his mates started talking about girls and women in this outrageously crude manner..." (page 280).
He also adds an interesting commentary on el chupaculismo with this excellent section on page 222 which consideres a fictitious Poet Laureate, Callum Jimenez and what he writes about:
"Similarly, when he wrote about the Gibraltarian national character he would never focus on the nepotism, the pancismo, the institutional corruption, the smuggling which was supposed to have ended in the mid-90s but continues unchecked on the sidelines, or even the sybaritic hankering for material goods..." to which Callum's Spanish boyfriend says: "Why don't you write about some of the not-so-nice-ehstuff as well?" Except the Poet Laureate doesn't think he can. Thank goodness none of us are poet laureates, and we can, and that Sanchez is so good at holding up a mirror to Gibraltarian society so we can see ourselves as we really are.
Sanchez tells those stories of Gibraltar that are gasping to be told and in that way immortalises those characters and those incidents that are an integral part of who we as a society have come to be. I too, lost a relative to the sea during those smuggling years. I watched the suffering of his parents and saw the fear and guilt in the eyes of his friends, those that survived. These are stories that simply have to be told. Sanchez' contribution to Gibraltar is not just another few thousand words on paper on a shelf, and it is not just an exemplifier of written llanito. It is a toast to those parts of our history and our culture that could so easily have disappeared, much like Hernandez has done for our lost patio culture of the twentieth century. Because of Sanchez, we will know that bit more about ourselves, and so will the rest of the world.
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| Photo courtesy of Pixabay |
I chose to read the llanito dialogue edition for the precise reason that Sanchez wrote it: because you cannot retain any grip on realism unless the words that come out of the mouths of his characters are delivered in the exact way they would have been spoken. Had he been writing about some highly anglicised member of Gibraltar's wealthier elite, English would have been fine, but for the rest of us that belong to the streets and alleys of El Peñon, it had to be llanito for it to ring true. If you can only read English, then the English version will work well anyway, but if you have even a small grip of Spanish, the llanito dialogue edition is ideal and will give you a true flavour of the characters and the stories. Sanchez' contribution to the recovery of the llanito language, which is such an intrinsic part of our identity and therefore should be also of our literature, is immeasurable.
The only thing is, there is a different story in the English edition that is not included in the llanito dialogue edition that sounds pretty intriguing and needs must I read that too! I can explain why: this particular story is about a Gibraltarian who returns to the Rock after forty years away and his response to the changes. I was away from Gibraltar for nearly thirty years and I am interested to compare that experience to mine.
As it is, Sanchez' stories slake my thirst for understanding what happened in Gibraltar, for picturing what life was like, what people experienced during my own 'missing years'. So while their contribution to Gibraltarian literanture is invaluable, and while they are literary gems in their own right, Sanchez' stories help me to add the missing threads to the fabric of my life. Gotta say it: thank you, Mark.
Now for planning out my next read...
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| Image courtesy of Pixaby |
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