Preface

Summary

According to Tom Shone, Christos Tsiolkas was “plucked from semi-obscurity and set on the literary rock-star track by his fourth novel, The Slap.” This fairly innocuous comment appeared near the opening of a Sunday Times article that Shone had based on an interview with Tsiolkas, conducted in New York in 2010. The setting is important. Shone and Tsiolkas are on the roof deck of the “quirky” and “boutique” Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Avenue. Tsiolkas is apparently awed by the Manhattan skyline. He is also fiddling with his cell phone and juggling other commitments in a way befitting for someone in the middle of an American book tour.

The article is fairly typical of the manner in which literary journalism introduces, or frames, an ostensibly new writer: the implicit approval of the marketplace is registered in an attention to the trappings of celebrity, while the distance between Manhattan and the suburbs of Melbourne, in which The Slap was set, also tells a story about international circulation that is a crucial part of a writer's claim on our attention. As Pascale Casanova has suggested, literary value can be as much a matter of geography as it is textuality, and like it or not, Australia is still one of the suburbs of world literature. In fairness to Shone, his article does make passing mention of Loaded and Dead Europe, and it does list some of their themes: “history, migration, blood, belonging, poverty, refuge, anti-Semitism.” The idea of plucking Tsiolkas from “semiobscurity” might have made sense to a British or North American readership, but to anyone who had paid even fleeting attention to the Australian literary scene over the preceding fifteen years, during which time Tsiolkas's fiction had become a staple of critical discussion, it was likely to be jarring. Nevertheless, the comment did highlight one of the most salient aspects of Tsiolkas's career: even after the enormous Australian interest generated by his 2005 novel Dead Europe, he had a very limited international profile.