New and Interesting

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Hopefully I am not straying too far from the intention of this board, but I thought it would be interesting to discuss recent finds that we have had in our reading. I'm not thinking here of book reviews as such, but rather drawing people's attention to works that have been done in an innovative way that might interest the nascent writers among us.

Georgina please feel free to delete if you don't think this is a suitable thread.

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I thought I'd kick off with the most recent book I've read. it's by a Melbourne author of Greek background.

Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

The Slap starts prosaically enough. A Greek man, Hector, is married to Aish, an Indian and they live in Melbourne suburbia. They are holding a barbecue and invite an assortment of family, friends and work colleagues around. As is usually the case, the kids come too.

One of the kids insists on acting up and behaving like a brat. After putting up with this behaviour for a long while, one of the adults slaps him.

This action sets off a whole chain of events, mostly inspired by the parents of the slapped child's decision to press assault charges.

What is interesting about this novel is Tsiolkas's structure. The first chapter, leading up to the slap, is centred on Hector. Each subsequent chapter focuses on one of the other attendees at the barbecue. In each case, Tsiolkas explores his character, filling out their back stories and also showing both their reaction to the slap and the impact the aftermath has on them.

Because Melbourne is such an eclectic place, a typical barbecue will include people from different cultural backgrounds and age groups. So Tsiolkas is able to combine his plot device and his structure to cover a wide array of social issues, including immigrant culture, trans-generational differences, class jealousies, death and dying, differing styles of parenting, gay coming-out, adultery, and many others. He is not obvious about this at all, he just demonstrates it through his characters' reactions to the slap.

Each chapter is slightly different and Tsiolkas resists the temptation to promote one point of view over another. All the reactions to the slap are shown as legitimate in some way, yet it is also a divisive and confrontational event. All of the characters he explores have their good and bad points and he presents them as very rounded people. He clearly sympathises most with the young gay character, but since he is a gay man himself that is not too surprising.

As a Melburnian, I got a lot out of his allusions to place names; in most cities places convey added social meanings, and he says a lot with simple things like Greeks moving from the inner to the outer suburbs. Once a statement that they'd become successful in Australia, Tsiolkas also shows that they left their communities behind them and lost contact with the friends of their youth. The chapter in which he explores this, the one on Hector's father, is extremely affecting and redolent with meaning.

Tsiolkas doesn't write many books - just six in 15 years - and he takes the time to get things right. He seems only to write when he really has something to say, and he says a lot in this novel.

[Georgina]

I think this is a perfectly suitable thread topic for this section. Reading lots is integral to good writing. Reading good work, even more so. I'll add when I feel I have something worthy. I'm reading quite a bit of non-fiction lately and bad fiction that other people are foisting on me that I feel obliged to read because they feel as if they are sharing something about themselves. When I hit on something clever, I'll talk about it. Meantime, please, feel free. I'm interested.

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Bit of an update for you ...

'Blown away' Tsiolkas takes prize

John Mangan
May 17, 2009

BEST-SELLING Melbourne author Christos Tsiolkas, renowned for his hard-hitting politics and frank portrayals of sex, joined the ranks of such international literary giants as Peter Carey, Janet Frame, Louis de Bernieres and Vikram Seth yesterday when he won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for his gritty tale of Melbourne suburbia, The Slap.

The $20,000 prize was announced at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif won the $10,000 best first book prize for his novel of political intrigue, A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

"I'm very overwhelmed, just blown away," Tsiolkas told The Sunday Age minutes after accepting the prize. "I said in my speech that there's no competition in the arts, and I really believe that. The main emotion is the privilege to be in the company of great writers.

"I wanted to reflect something of contemporary Australia in the book, the way it looks and sounds and feels now. I think that's what people have been responding to in Australia — it's incredible that people from other parts of the world respond to it too."

His favourite critique of the book, he said, came from a reviewer who described it as "a satanic version of Neighbours".

Chair of the prize's judging panel, Nicholas Hasluck, praised The Slap's use of the iconic backyard barbecue to examine identities and personal relationships in a multicultural society, offering points of view from eight different characters.

"It taps into universal tensions and dilemmas around family life and child-rearing," Hasluck said. "This book is sure to challenge readers and provoke debate."

Sunday Age reviewer Liza Power identified a sense of intimacy that made the novel a delight.

"Here is a world in which the landmarks, street signs and passers-by, both figurative and literal, are instantly recognisable. So much so, in fact, that when you arrive at the scene — a suburban barbecue — that will overshadow the novel's subsequent chapters, it too feels like a place you've visited many times before."

Born and bred in Melbourne, Tsiolkas' first novel was the gay, Greek, grunge classic Loaded (1995), which was made into the film Head On (1998) starring Alex Dimitriades. He has also written The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age fiction prize.

The Slap has been shortlisted for this year's Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and for the Miles Franklin Award, where Tsiolkas is up against Tim Winton, Murray Bail, Richard Flanagan and Louis Nowra. The Miles Franklin winner will be announced next month.

This story was found at:

www.theage.com.au/articles/2009/05/16/1242335936466.html

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After Oscar's post about Project Gutenberg, I spent some time downloading online books to my iPhone to read on the train.

The great thing about Gutenberg is the vast trove of minor and forgotten masterpieces that lurk there. Rather than go looking for something specific, I just noodled around and downloaded stuff that took my fancy. Much of it i'd never heard of before.

With at least one of my downloads, I struck gold. My favourite book of all time is unquestionably 1066 And All That a howlingly funny re-telling of English history by people with only vague recollection of what they were taught in school. Well I have finally found the equivalent book for US history. It is called A Comic History of the United States, by Bill Nye. I'm only partway though it, but already the bits on Columbus, the Conquistadores and the Indians' response to the early settlers have had me guffawing on the train.