'An audacious and transformative novel about the past, the present and the power of writing and imagination from the award-winning author of Damascus and The Slap.
'Art is not only about rage and justice and politics. It is also about pleasure and joy; it is also about beauty…
In a time of rage and confusion, I wanted to write about beauty.
-Christos Tsiolkas
'A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away, and he becomes lost in memory and beauty …
'He also begins to tell us a story …
'A retired porn star is made an offer he can't refuse for the sake of his family and future. So he returns to the world he fled years before, all too aware of the danger of opening the door to past temptations and long-buried desires. Can he resist the oblivion and bliss they promise?
'A breathtakingly audacious novel by the acclaimed author of The Slap and Damascus about finding joy and beauty in a raging and punitive world, about the refractions of memory and time and, most subversive of all, about the mystery of art and its creation.' (Publication summary)
'What might thinking with specific waters, and particular watery forms, bring to our understandings of how literature comes to mean? Taking cues from recent work in both the Blue Humanities – inspired by Pacific scholars – and the posthumanities, this article considers examples of recent writing in order to explore what is revealed when focus shifts to the aqueous. What ‘transversal alliances’ (Braidotti) and concomitant limitations are highlighted in writings and readings that take account of water? Thinking with a peculiarly Australian form of fluvial geomorphology – the chain of ponds – I consider four recent texts: John Kinsella’s 'Cellnight'; Natalie Harkin’s ‘Cultural Precinct’; Tony Birch’s The White Girl, and Christos Tsiolkas’s 7½. Thinking with the chain of ponds reveals aspects of ‘hydrocolonialisms’ (Hofmeyr) and immersive ontologies. While all waters are revealed to be operating within the multiple restrictions of the nation state together with anthropogenic climate emergency, a focus on waters reveals possibilities of renewal as well as human and more-than-human connections. Taking this beyond the island continent to trans-Pacific links, I also consider the ways such connections are joyfully celebrated in Lisa Reihana’s indigifuturist video work Groundloop.' (Publication abstract)
'I have admired Christos Tsiolkas since his first book Loaded rammed into the Australian publishing scene in 1995. And although the ‘big P’ – to use the author’s designation – political books that catapulted him to fame didn’t affect me to the same degree, 7 ½ rocked my world.
'It is wild and fearlessly, messily, human. I was so exhilarated, I couldn’t stop myself from emailing him a slew of questions. It was my way of continuing a thrilling reading process – one that took me back to the author’s early work. Jesus Man and Dead Europe came to mind as I powered through this audacious novel.
'Beyond that, there was the thrill of watching a writer turn novelistic expectations on their head by showing the reader what goes on in a writer’s mind as he corralls life’s wild horses and turns them to the services of art.' (Introduction)
'I now find it jarring to watch films or television programs which depict characters standing closer than one and a half metres apart, failing to don their face masks, or ignoring the use of hand sanitiser. Their naivety is frustrating and glaring. Literature which sidesteps or ignores the pandemic, the way life is now, comes across as illusory, idealised, or fantastic, as if it is taking place in an alternate universe.' (Introduction)
'December 2021 I talked to Christos Tsiolkas about his latest novel 7 ½. Russia had not launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine by land, sea, and air. Two weeks into a major war on the European continent and all cultural and political certainties have vanished. The left and woke are confused, as are the nationalist right, it is this type of confusion, which much of 7 ½ deals with in the context of a novel.' (Introduction)
'On page 20 of my advance copy of 7½, I insert a line in the margin: ‘Starting to sound like Sōseki’s Kusamakura here’. I had met the author of the passage – a man named Christos Tsiolkas – at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May, sidling up to the Clare Hotel breakfast bar at an enviably early hour each morning to enjoy fruit and festival conversation. As my pen hovers, I wonder how that gregarious and personable figure squares with the bittersweet register of this novel.' (Introduction)
'I now find it jarring to watch films or television programs which depict characters standing closer than one and a half metres apart, failing to don their face masks, or ignoring the use of hand sanitiser. Their naivety is frustrating and glaring. Literature which sidesteps or ignores the pandemic, the way life is now, comes across as illusory, idealised, or fantastic, as if it is taking place in an alternate universe.' (Introduction)
'Chasing beauty in three intertwining stories.'
'Lockdown forced the Australian author to contemplate both his interior life and the big picture. The result is 7½, a work of autofiction that ‘just poured out’'
Live Recording : Christos Tsiolkas in Conversation
Angela Savage
(interviewer),
2021
23474816
2021
single work
podcast
interview
'A conversation between authors Christos Tsiolkas and Angela Savage to celebrate the release of Tsiolkas' latest novel, Seven and a Half.' (Production summary)
'December 2021 I talked to Christos Tsiolkas about his latest novel 7 ½. Russia had not launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine by land, sea, and air. Two weeks into a major war on the European continent and all cultural and political certainties have vanished. The left and woke are confused, as are the nationalist right, it is this type of confusion, which much of 7 ½ deals with in the context of a novel.' (Introduction)
'I have admired Christos Tsiolkas since his first book Loaded rammed into the Australian publishing scene in 1995. And although the ‘big P’ – to use the author’s designation – political books that catapulted him to fame didn’t affect me to the same degree, 7 ½ rocked my world.
'It is wild and fearlessly, messily, human. I was so exhilarated, I couldn’t stop myself from emailing him a slew of questions. It was my way of continuing a thrilling reading process – one that took me back to the author’s early work. Jesus Man and Dead Europe came to mind as I powered through this audacious novel.
'Beyond that, there was the thrill of watching a writer turn novelistic expectations on their head by showing the reader what goes on in a writer’s mind as he corralls life’s wild horses and turns them to the services of art.' (Introduction)
'What might thinking with specific waters, and particular watery forms, bring to our understandings of how literature comes to mean? Taking cues from recent work in both the Blue Humanities – inspired by Pacific scholars – and the posthumanities, this article considers examples of recent writing in order to explore what is revealed when focus shifts to the aqueous. What ‘transversal alliances’ (Braidotti) and concomitant limitations are highlighted in writings and readings that take account of water? Thinking with a peculiarly Australian form of fluvial geomorphology – the chain of ponds – I consider four recent texts: John Kinsella’s 'Cellnight'; Natalie Harkin’s ‘Cultural Precinct’; Tony Birch’s The White Girl, and Christos Tsiolkas’s 7½. Thinking with the chain of ponds reveals aspects of ‘hydrocolonialisms’ (Hofmeyr) and immersive ontologies. While all waters are revealed to be operating within the multiple restrictions of the nation state together with anthropogenic climate emergency, a focus on waters reveals possibilities of renewal as well as human and more-than-human connections. Taking this beyond the island continent to trans-Pacific links, I also consider the ways such connections are joyfully celebrated in Lisa Reihana’s indigifuturist video work Groundloop.' (Publication abstract)
