AWRF 2009: Christos talking

Campbell from the readers services team was at "An hour with Christos Tsiolkas", chaired by Charlotte Grimshaw. Here is his dispatch from the front (third row from):

I turn up late and the woman at the door takes my ticket, says I can get it back after the talk. I was planning to use it as a bookmark. I take my seat third row from the front to the right of the podium. Somebody left a handbag under the seat next to me, possibly the woman who is doing the introduction. I forgot to wear my glasses but my blurry impression is that she has a nice haircut and facial structure. Christos is wearing matching black shirt and jeans, which have faded to an almost identical degree. They sit and Christos is asked questions about the new book ('The Slap'). He speaks of the effect of wealth on the Australian people and an incident involving offensive youths in public. I think about a similar incident I witnessed last time I was in Australia. He has anger in his voice, includes many umms, and errs but there is urgency to the way he speaks which I like. His jeans are loose fitting and bunch up around his shoes. I think about my own jeans, how I have folded up the bottoms of the legs because they are too long. He stands at the podium and reads from ‘The Slap’. I try to remember watching ‘Head On’ when I was younger but the memory is cloudy. He sits down and answers more questions. He is complimented on his ability to write about sex from the female perspective. The audience giggles. He reads from an older book called 'Dead Europe'. He seems to be more passionate about this book. The talk ends with questions from the audience. Two questions are asked; the first he answers with ease but the second is more difficult and is cut short due to time issues. This is disappointing. I leave the talk and struggle through the crowd of people waiting. There is a long line of people within the crowd waiting to have their books signed.

AWRF 2009: Meeting Tsiolkas

Saturday afternoon I was driving lackadaisically down New North Rd. when a dangling sign caught my eye. “Mt. Albert Veterinary Centre”.  I pictured Aisha on duty inside, looking Michelle Obama-style gorgeous in a white lab coat. And Connie was there too, sitting on a bench, detachedly wiggling her toes in dirty pink shoes. A second later, as the sign jumped to my rear-view mirror, I realized that Aisha and Connie live in Melbourne, and also, they are characters in a novel.

A quote that’s gotten a lot of publicity about The Slap, the book in which they appear, is that it’s a satanic “Neighbours”. I haven’t seen "Neighbours"; still, I’ve done a fair amount of TV in my life and my intuition is that it is far more correct to say that "Neighbours" is a vapidThe Slap.

For this book about modern Australia, after he wrote about old Europe in Dead Europe, Christos Tsiolkas used what he calls a Rashomon structure, after the classic Japanese movie which tells the story of a rape from many points of view. Here the rape is a slap, although the turmoil it creates among these Australian suburbanite twenties-thirties-somethings implies the inverse. The fact is, they don’t have an awful lot of other things going on to distract them. They aren’t very perceptive. They are greedy. They aren’t very likable. But I loved seeing inside their heads. It became impossible to put the book down: I was rushing downstream on the current of its revelations.

“I like the teenagers and the old man.” Christos Tsiolkas says to me when I get to talk to him. The ‘s’ sound is the particularity of the Greek language, there are lots of them, and they are softer than ours, sliding almost into ‘sh’ . Christos Tsiolkas has that ‘s’ when he speaks English. He speaks quickly, and he laughs easily and he says “Manolis-sh” for Manolis, who is that old man. He explains that he put Manolis-sh in because he wanted a character who would bring gravity into his story. I was reminded of the sweeping judgment a famous Italian architect delivered when they asked him why there were so few great women architects. “Women have no sense of the grave.” he said. The Greek words for ‘grave’ are sovaros – severe, austeros -- austere, and agrios – cruel, fierce and proud. 

Christos Tsiolkas is not grave but -- to use a Gertrude-Steinian turn of phrase -- I sense he has a sense of the grave. His literary love is Philip Roth, that author famed for being witty about sex, but also about death. The day after talking to CT, I came across a shiny new copy of Exit Ghost at the library, and I thought of him and opened it to have a look.

“You’re writing about the family business, are you?”

He nodded and he shrugged and he sighed. “And the family. I’m trying to, anyway. I more or less grew up in the store.  I’ve heard a thousand stories from my grandfather. Every time I go to see him I fill another notebook. I’ve got stories enough to last a lifetime. But it’s all a matter of how, isn’t it? I mean, how you tell them.”

Read the interview with Christos Tsiolkas.

AWRF 2009: Mandla Langa

Mandla Langa is from South Africa. During apartheid he spent 19 years in exile, in Africa and in Europe, mostly working for the ANC. His bookThe Lost Colours of the Chameleon is a satiric allegory about the nature of power and it won Best Book for Africa in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. I'm not sure what intuition led me to seek an interview with him, but as soon as he walked up to where I was sitting in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza Hotel and smiled at me, I knew I had lucked out. This extraordinary man exudes gravity, lucidity, strength, and shines with generosity, grace and delight in life. He gave me a full hour of his time, and then went looking for his wife so I could meet her.

The next day when I told Christos Tsiolkas, explorer of "the dark crevices of the Australian suburban landscape" and de facto star of the Festival, how I had been blown away by Mandla Langa, he looked at me with joy. "You know!" he said. "He's my wise old man!"

I said to Mandla Langa, as we considered the horrors of the African continent, "It must be very frustrating... Do you manage to still wake up in the morning and say 'Let's see what we can get done today'? You have a very strong character I think."

Here is how he answered me -- I'm formatting it to show the rhythm of his speech:

I think despair, despair, despair, it is a natural emotion – reaction --
but at the same time it is a very self-indulgent emotion
in the sense that life cannot really be sustained on despair.
I don’t think so.

That is the truth, and when I look at South Africa
I also look at other countries on the continent
and in October of last year we were in Algeria
and I was watching on television the stampede which was happening
when the food parcels were being distributed
the same way as in Darfur
and you look at kids who are being pressed against gates and fences
and then you say to yourself
which is the thing that I try to say in Lost Colours of the Chameleon
that once you have dysfunctional leadership
you will have an accumulation of corpses
you will have people dying. And when you then say,
What do I see being wrong in other countries
some of it is wrong in our country.

And it is that lack of connection
and creation of the logical connection between dysfunctional leadership and poverty
because there is just too much in all of our countries to feed everyone
but what has to happen is that there are people who are willing to say
"this is how we should go
and this is how we can go
and this is what we should do"
and be willing to take sometimes
that unpopular step
of curbing the excesses
curbing the greed.