AustLit

'This article considers the way in which elite swimming in Australia constitutes a system of identity to frame the privileging of heterosexuality, able-bodiedness and hypermasculinity in Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Barracuda (2013) and its television adaptation (2016). It argues that the two versions of the story offer very different sporting narratives: a migrant, working-class, gay body in the novel, the complexity of which is never fully realised on screen. The article shows how the television adaptation of Barracuda reshapes the novel’s atemporal structure into a linear progression of rise, fall and redemption, and that under these narrative conditions Daniel Kelly’s body becomes simply object, rather than embracing the subjecthood he is permitted in the novel. The effect is one of compulsory normalisation and erasure: of Danny’s queer body, of Dennis’s and Martin’s damaged bodies, and of the consequences of Danny’s criminal act. This process parallels similar attitudes towards Australia’s most elite athletes and the public ownership of their body narratives.' (Publication abstract)

'Christos Tsiolkas has occupied an increasingly central position in the contemporary Australian literary and cultural imagination. Starting with his novel Loaded (1995), Tsiolkas’s fiction engages with subject matter that speaks to his personal experience as both a gay man of Greek heritage and a writer concerned with larger social and political issues affecting a multicultural Australia. Examples of recurring themes in Tsiolkas’s fiction include the irreconcilability of Greek and Australian identity, racial and class intolerance, emergent sexual consciousness, and the conflict between familial obligation and individual expression. In contrast to these arguably “reader-friendly” themes—that is, themes that are accessible to a wide and non-specialist audience—Tsiolkas’s early novels (Loaded; The Jesus Man, 1999; and Dead Europe, 2005) possess a subversive edge in how they explore obscenity and social transgression. However, the publication of Tsiolkas’s fourth novel, The Slap (2008), signalled a new phase in his career, in which the formal rawness of his prose and his uncompromising representation of extreme corporeal states gave way to a simplicity in his written expression that mirrored the growing topicality of his subject matter. This change in purpose mirrors the shift in both the reception of Tsiolkas the writer and of his fiction. Prior to The Slap, Tsiolkas was viewed as a “cult figure” who, though of some critical interest, neither captivated the attention of a mainstream audience nor was celebrated by the literary establishment as an “Australian” writer whose fiction reflected purportedly national interests. However, the critical and commercial success of The Slap has ensured that both Tsiolkas and his subsequent fiction have been (re)cast as pivotal sites of commentary on contemporary Australian class and racial politics. Put another way, Tsiolkas’s “increasing visibility … as a public intellectual, if not a literary celebrity”, has resulted in changes to the form, language and subject matter of his novels, and also the ways critics receive and understand his career.' (Publication abstract)