Christos Tsiolkas and the Ghosts of our Past

With the arrival of his first novel in 1995, Loaded, Christos Tsiolkas became a voice for a new generation of Australians. The book's main character, Ari - later made into the flesh by actor Alex Dimitriades in the film adaptation Head On - represented a young, gay Greek Australian man, angered by classism and racism to the point of self-destruction, and confused with his place in the world that surrounds him. This character would be reborn in many other men in Tsiolkas' books, as would these themes become the crux of his work. His other novels include The Jesus Man (1999), Dead Europe (2005; winner of The Age Book of the Year), The Slap (2008; winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted into an award winning mini-series) and his latest book Barracuda (2013). He is a multi-talented writer with an autobiography and book of essays to add to his collection, as well as 'playwright' and 'screenwriter' to add to his list of titles. Often referred to by literary critics as our most controversial writer, Christos Tsiolkas lays bare what it means to be Australian, and in this interview I revisit what for me is his most controversial book, Dead Europe

(De)Touring Europe: The Balkan, The Postcolonial and Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe

This article will interrogate the fictional mobilisation of ‘the Balkan’ as a trope in Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Dead Europe. Reversing the conventions of European travel writing, the novel stages a shambolic Grand Tour of vampiric contamination, which exposes the vacuity of Europe’s self-professed ideals of progress, rationality and liberalism. Whilst bearing the imprint of a recognisable Balkanist rhetoric which locates the origins of racial prejudice in a Second World War Greek village and the excesses of conspicuous consumption in a contemporary Athens, Dead Europe also presents ‘the Balkan’ as a disruptive medium which jostles the Australian protagonist out of his political complacency and awakens him to his own visceral, if spectral, relation to prejudice. ‘The Balkan’ in this set-up does not function as a mere backdrop to identify against; rather, it is a site of a radical interrogation of the coherence, boundedness and erasures of the (Australian and European) self – an interrogation that confronts without offering a solution or redemption