Review: The Slap (Christos Tsiolkas)
Aug. 26th, 2010 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jawnbc You're hosting a barbecue for family and good friends. One of the kids is an obnoxious, untamed brat. And when he raises a cricket bat to strike your cousin's son your cousin slaps the brat.
Sound like perhaps a facile premise for a novel? I found the idea intriguing--even more so when I learned the author of the book is Christos Tsiolkas. Tsiolkas made quite the literary debut in Australia with Loaded, the story of a queer Greek-Australian teen teetering on the edge of disaster in early 1990s Melbourne. Eventually a film version (Head On) was made and distributed overseas on the art house cinema circuit. There's a lot of sex and partying in Loaded--particularly drug injection--that to my mind has always positioned shooting drugs normatively--more than it is, more than it should be.
The Slap is much more sophisticated than one might assume--though the voices throughout are (with perhaps one or two exceptions) are anything but. Lots of books have had multiple characters retelling a story from differing perspectives: Tsiolkas instead has each character tell a different period of the overall narrative's chronology--never wholly linearly, sometimes perhaps ancillarily.
It works, largely, and the reason is the characters. At the core is the first generation of Greek-Australians: those whose parents emigrated from Europe after WW II. They straddle cultures (Aussie and Greek) and languages (ditto). But their friends and spouses include those whose families have been Australian for generations, the scion of other European immigrants, and one whose parents came to Australia from India.
In telling their portion of the story they are also telling their story. And in describing their interactions with others they're telling modern Australia's. From the perspective of an elderly Greek through to that of a two adolescents in their leaving (final) year of high school.
Tsiolkas won the 2009 Commonwealth Writer's Prize (regional and global) for The Slap, and I can see why. The book has many merits--but it's also the sort of intercultural lens that seems to warm the post-colonial hearts of the Commonwealth Foundation. It's also on the long list for this year's Man Booker Prize (7 September the short list is announced). Is this Booker calibre work? I'm not sure. But it's very much note- and praise-worthy.
Still too much of that drug shooting shite though. Seriously.
Sound like perhaps a facile premise for a novel? I found the idea intriguing--even more so when I learned the author of the book is Christos Tsiolkas. Tsiolkas made quite the literary debut in Australia with Loaded, the story of a queer Greek-Australian teen teetering on the edge of disaster in early 1990s Melbourne. Eventually a film version (Head On) was made and distributed overseas on the art house cinema circuit. There's a lot of sex and partying in Loaded--particularly drug injection--that to my mind has always positioned shooting drugs normatively--more than it is, more than it should be.
The Slap is much more sophisticated than one might assume--though the voices throughout are (with perhaps one or two exceptions) are anything but. Lots of books have had multiple characters retelling a story from differing perspectives: Tsiolkas instead has each character tell a different period of the overall narrative's chronology--never wholly linearly, sometimes perhaps ancillarily.
It works, largely, and the reason is the characters. At the core is the first generation of Greek-Australians: those whose parents emigrated from Europe after WW II. They straddle cultures (Aussie and Greek) and languages (ditto). But their friends and spouses include those whose families have been Australian for generations, the scion of other European immigrants, and one whose parents came to Australia from India.
In telling their portion of the story they are also telling their story. And in describing their interactions with others they're telling modern Australia's. From the perspective of an elderly Greek through to that of a two adolescents in their leaving (final) year of high school.
Tsiolkas won the 2009 Commonwealth Writer's Prize (regional and global) for The Slap, and I can see why. The book has many merits--but it's also the sort of intercultural lens that seems to warm the post-colonial hearts of the Commonwealth Foundation. It's also on the long list for this year's Man Booker Prize (7 September the short list is announced). Is this Booker calibre work? I'm not sure. But it's very much note- and praise-worthy.
Still too much of that drug shooting shite though. Seriously.
