Cirrus@Austlit

Dead Europe is a phenomenal and terrible act of imaginative writing. Robert Manne (not unjustifiably) has already criticized its use of 'some of the oldest and most consequential anti-Semitic libels' (2005, 53). Briefly, the book tells the story of Isaac Rafits, a homosexual Greek Australian photographer who travels back to Europe to locate two ancestral legacies in Greece. The first is in his mother's village, where a curse was unleashed on his family because his grandparents murdered a young Jewish boy in the Second World War, a boy they had sworn to protect. His father's Greek, Communist Party membership badge is Isaac's second legacy and he carries the badge with him throughout his travels. And so begins Isaac's modern day pilgrimage through Western Europe. This article goes on to describe the dystopian future which Dead Europe imagines in the time tense of the 'future-present', wherein Tsiolkas creates the world as a warning; a world which demands a new Enlightenment.

(Source : Social Alternatives : Utopias Dystopias : Alternative Visions, 2009)