- Tsiolkas has written in 7 1/2 a confronting but ultimately unsatisfying mishmash of genres: memoir, realistic fiction, essayistic reflections, nature writing, childhood memories and movie critiques.
- I am writing a book about beauty. I want it to be simple, almost straightforward in its intent. If I were a poet it would be easier. Or if I were a musician. It’s harder to distill beauty into prose. The novel is treacherous.
- Fundamentally it's a celebration of the body in all its sensuality, pungent extrusions, youth and ageing. It’s also very gay. Tsiolkas is obsessed with the look and smell of sweaty armpits and beautiful male bodies. His uncle Nikos and his father’s friend Stavros inspired and attracted him while growing up. They were working class, with rough hands and sublime bodies. His wider focus is the beauty of nature in all its dazzling colours, and its birds, insects, animals, flowers, beaches, mountains and storms.
- Though he briefly refers to the bushfires in early 2020 there is no reference to the harshness and loneliness of the interior; no reference to regional towns and their challenges and provincialism, and no reference to Indigenous lands. Disappointingly European visitors seem to want to see people, to drink coffee or wine or beer in a promenade cafe. They want motion and movement: they fear, and are made anxious by, this wondrous remoteness. It affirms that they are indeed outsiders, strangers. Whereas I return here again and again.
- This novel is far removed from the earthy, angry, realism we're come to love and expect from Tsiolkas. In fact he criticises that genre mercilessly here, effectively condemning his own oeuvre.
I am nauseated by their arrogance and their naivety...I have been agreeing to it for a generation now, and increment by increment and timid sentence by timid sentence I have been substituting moralism for imagination...How more tedious can the contemporary novel become?…I go into a bookshop these days and it is as if the shelves are filled with the agonised and narcissistic rantings of teenagers...I’m tired of being angry all the time...Our literature of the last half century has been the babblings from the university. There is so much I love in that chatter: incisiveness, interrogation, the engagement with reckoning. But not its arrogance, not its moral certitude, not its self-righteousness, not its smugness and not its masochism...I shed Justice, Society, Love, Equality, Liberty and Revolution...Shit on the censors of the Church and state, urinate on the puritans of the left and right. Pursue beauty.....I need to dive into the sensuous, bestial and amoral splendour of this world.
- Tsiolkas always incites a visceral reaction, and this book is no exception. He never shies away from celebrating bodily functions including sweating, reeking, pissing and shitting. And the Gothic character of much of his prose, honouring his Greek and Christian origins, elevates to mythic status the often quotidian realities he’s describing. I write in English, but I speak it with a Greek tongue.
- In fact the thickness of his prose often becomes tiresome. He himself calls it ‘baroque’. Everyday events and weather patterns are subjected to an arch, heavy handed style.
- His friend Andrea’s critique of him is spot on. You have a particular skill….that emotional and unrepentant honesty…..that rawness doesn’t feel diluted. As she implies, this book is a surrender, a capitulation to self-indulgence, a shameless retreat.
- Ironically, given his rants noted above, there is a realist subplot in the novel - the story of the former gay porn star Paul. Apparently this has been long simmering in his creative brain. Whether it ended up a novel, a play or a film, it was going to be called Sweet Thing, named after Van Morrison's classic song. We're introduced to Paul, an American, and his wife Jenna (also a former porn star) via an extraordinary sex scene between them. It's lusciously described in erotic detail. Tsiolkas is so obsessed with sex in this novel that it strikes me as immature and it typifies his self-indulgence.
- Paul also has a brother, Andy, who is still living in their old family house in LA. He's a thin, scrawny, dying junkie, married to another junkie. The stoned Paul is disgusted with himself after he touches and kisses the stoned wife. He has been sucked back into the 'netherworld' and is desperate to escape by returning to Australia and its physical beauty. This is melodrama writ large. It's cliched and overwrought nonsense.
- I guess one could argue that Tsiolkas is in fact satirising the contemporary and fashionable critique of realism in fiction, but there's little evidence that this is the case.
- This novel just doesn't gel. It won't be popular, it won't sell, and it will quickly be forgotten.
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