AustLit

'From child prostitutes in Prague to wogs in suburban Melbourne, Christos Tsiolkas's fiction is full of characters defined by the desire for, discrimination against, and addiction to some form of Other. His work traces a libidinal economy that thrives where utopian ideals such as communism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism have failed to unify people around anything other than consumption. With particular attention to Dead Europe (2005) and Merciless Gods (2014), this article considers Tsiolkas's work alongside that of Roberto Bolaño, particularly 2666 (2004). Tsiolkas and Bolaño unearth the intersections between desire and violence across cultural, geopolitical and temporal borders. Their work offends because it implicates the subject in violence that is neither sensational nor exceptional. This violence is ongoing and without a clearly identifiable agent. Sometimes set against historical violence, such as the Holocaust, 9/11 or white Australian colonialism, it emerges in the backyard barbecues, drug-fuelled house parties and porn theatres that Tsiolkas's characters populate. This article uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to examine how Tsiolkas's work redistributes the violence from the pathological and geopolitical peripheries to the centre, disrupting Australian narratives of innocence and isolation and bringing together North and South, the Old World and the New.' (Publication abstract)

'The short stories in Christos Tsiolkas’s Merciless Gods (2014) offer perhaps his most complete and comprehensive portrait of the contemporary world. This assertion goes against conventional wisdom, especially in postcolonial literature, where the novel has long been a privileged form of speaking truth from the periphery to the centre, and in Australian literature, where what Timothy Brennan calls the “national longing for form” has typically dictated generic decisions. Tsiolkas achieves a greater coverage through fragmentation than through an ambitious total novel, particularly because of the juxtaposition of shocking detail and a fundamental and wholesome valuation of life. This valuation, however, is explicable by queer and post-political theorists such as Judith Butler, Wendy Brown and Jasbir Puar, and does not try to reconstitute a world anterior to difference and globalisation. Tsiolkas, while shocking the reader, also provides a conjectural affirmation of a plural Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'Merciless Gods (2014) is Christos Tsiolkas’s only collection of short stories and arguably his least discussed work to date. Comprising stories that Tsiolkas published in various literary magazines and anthologies as early as 1995, Merciless Gods is persistent in its fixation on the relationship between queer desire, identity, and disgust. Throughout the collection, characters are frequently exposed to the bodily discharges that most of us tend to dissociate from, cringe at, and conceal from one another: sweat, semen, odor, and excrement. Characters also blurt out vile homophobic and racist bigotry in impulsive overflows of speech that bring about release and disgust at the same time. In this article, we read the spasmic (in all its forms) as a liminal space of joy and repulsion that constitutes what we call Tsiolkas’s politics of disgust. We argue that disgust is crucial to Tsiolkas’s deeply humanist and densely historical project, best exemplified in Merciless Gods in the ways that form—short fiction and the collection—arouses distinct feelings in readers that they cannot escape and that Tsiolkas’s work refuses to gloss over. In this way, Merciless Gods testifies to Tsiolkas’s compulsive return to fundamental questions of justice and distribution of misery and well-being.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay examines Christos Tsiolkas’s short stories. Tsiolkas’s stories are less widely known compared to his novels and often unsettle the view of his writing popularised by his best-selling fourth novel, The Slap (2008). The stories collected in Merciless Gods (2014) suggest new ways of thinking about Tsiolkas’s often criticised writing style and his reliance on first-person male narrators. The stories in Merciless Gods also tend to have a more varied and interesting provenance than the single author collection of the successful novelist. This essay therefore considers the original publication contexts of Tsiolkas’s stories and their post-publication editing history. Finally, this essay contextualises Tsiolkas’s stories in relation to some of the structural dynamics of Australian short story publishing over the past three decades, including authorial publishing subsidies, multi-author theme anthologies, and the expansion of university creative writing programs. This suggests that Tsiolkas’s path to Merciless Gods is not unusual for a writer who came of age in the 1990s and achieved success as a novelist in the following decade, even though these dynamics are not necessarily the same for Australian short story writers today.' (Publication abstract)

'This article takes up a specific feature of Christos Tsiolkas's writing, his style. Focusing on Tsiolkas's fourth novel, The Slap, this article argues that Tsiolkas’s style is an inarticulate style: a style that does not always use the right word at the right moment, that employs language for narrative utility rather than its own sake, and that sporadically departs from standard usage and correctness in ways that do not appear artistically motivated. My argument is that The Slap is notable among contemporary fiction in that what I consider to be Tsiolkas’s worst sentences are the most revealing of his inclinations as a novelist. Consequently, I depart from what has become a standard formula in Tsiolkas's reception, that where Tsiolkas succeeds as a writer he succeeds in spite of his style. Finally, this article also contributes to recent debates about the purpose and vocabulary of Australian literary discussion: how critics debate the work of a prize-winning author, how criticism and praise operate in critical judgements, and the significance of style in evaluations of literature.' (Publication abstract)