July 14, 2014
Tsiolkas (The Slap) tells the story of the pressures of trying to live up to high expectations. Relentlessly bullied at the elite Australian private high school he attends on scholarship, working-class Dan Kelly shows early promise as a swimmer. With the hopes of his parents, coach, and suddenly envious classmates riding on him, Dan becomes fixated on winning at all costs. But when he places fifth at his first international championship race, he breaks down, lashing out violently at his former friends and turns to alcohol for consolation. When a masochistic affair with the wealthy Martin Taylor brings Dan’s sexual identity to the fore, he finds himself at the breaking point and comes close to committing murder. He spends some time in prison, and, after his release, he travels to his family’s homeland in Glasgow, where he falls in love with the angelic Clyde. But before he can get too involved, he must return to Australia, face his mistakes, and try to reconcile with his struggling family. The novel has all the early signs of a classic failure narrative along the lines of Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, but it loses direction in its second half. Additionally, the alternating chapters—in which the contemporary Dan speaks in the first-person—are actually more distant than the more affecting third-person parts. This story never quite realizes its full potential but Tsiolkas’s sincerity qualifies it as solidly middleweight.
Starred review from August 1, 2014
Australian novelist Tsiolkas (The Slap, 2008, etc.) serves up a bracing poolside critique of Antipodean mores. The trope of athletic contest as coming-of-age backdrop is an old one, though more seen in film than literature since the days of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Tsiolkas' latest takes an athletically gifted young man-Danny here, Dan there, Barracuda everywhere, thanks to his habit of churning up the water and devouring his opponents-across two decades. As we find him at first, Danny, a working-class scholarship student, is on the loutish side, swimming for a school that he calls "Cunts College," a place for the rich and privileged and not the likes of him. Only dimly self-aware, Danny flourishes under the tutelage of a Hungarian-born mentor who had coached the team "to first in every school sports meet of the last seven years." The fact of Coach Torma's foreignness is important, because everyone in Australia, it seems, is from someplace else, and immigration and exile underlie the Greek-descended author's story. In time, Danny, now a grown-up Dan, will be someplace else, too, for though he is Olympic material, he fails to live up to his promise for reasons that move the story along, taking him to far-off Glasgow and into the complexities of sexuality, so torn up about events that he can't bring himself to enter the water. Dan's struggle to resolve the too-abundant conflicts that beset him, including hinted-at legal trouble, makes us sorry to see the once-golden boy stumble and fall. Still, he finds redemption of a kind in his homeland, which remains welcoming even though Dan/Danny has only an untutored, reflexive appreciation for its moderate politics; at the end, as Tsiolkas has one accidentally wise character note, "[w]e're lucky here, Danny, this country just sails on, impervious to the shit that the rest of the world is drowning in. Jesus, no wonder any bastard who gets on a boat wants to come here." A tough, unsparing, closely observed and decidedly R-rated look at the many challenges and disappointments that life brings, told against settings that American readers will find at once familiar and exotic.
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September 15, 2014
The water was like air to Danny Kelly. Thanks to his swimming ability, the working-class Australian boy earns a scholarship to an expensive school, but the life he was dreaming of is shattered when he performs poorly in his first big championship. His pain at losing is stinging and pervasive, and his struggle to find an identity out of the pool provides the grist for this physical coming-of-age tale. Tsiolkas (The Slap, 2010) perfectly captures the arrogance and agonies of youth, complete with profanity and locker-room mockery, the endless posturing of an all-boys school. So complete is the separation between Danny the swimmer and Dan the adult that Tsiolkas even uses different forms of narration for the two sides of his character as the story bounces back and forth. Stunned and adrift, Dan embarks on a search for meaning, as he slowly tries forgiving himself and his loved ones. His emotions hum mercilessly beneath the surface, and the novel, although slightly bloated, burns with razor-raw insight. His is a ferocious failure, and it translates to engrossing readingmore so, in fact, than most tales of sporting triumph.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)
September 1, 2014
Dan Kelly has the Sydney Olympics in his sights. One of Coach Torma's golden boys, though he's a Melbourne working-class lad on scholarship at a posh private school, Dan knows he's the fastest swimmer on the squad. But, like Icarus flying too close to the sun, Dan ignores his coach's advice and fails spectacularly in front of thousands. Internalizing the shame, he rejects the comfort of his family and best friend Demet, nursing a visceral rage at the world he believes denied him glory. This anger explodes in a violent altercation that lands Dan in prison, where he steeps himself in literature and begins the process of reinvention. Once outside, Dan works as a caretaker of adults with disabilities and forges a relationship with his lover, Clyde, who penetrates Dan's carapace for a while. But even a move to Clyde's Scotland won't help Dan find redemption. Only in Australia, in the bosom of his family, will he become a man he can look at in the mirror. VERDICT This disturbing yet satisfying story by Commonwealth Prize winner Tsiolkas (The Slap) examines themes of class consciousness, family conflict, loyalty, and friendship. The often harsh, sometimes brutal novel about the fine line between love and hate, pain and pleasure, is infused with language so beautiful that it takes one's breath away. [See Prepub Alert, 3/31/14.]--Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
August 8, 2013
After the success of 2008’s The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas could be excused for feeling he had nothing more to prove. Perhaps though it was that completely unexpected good fortune that planted one of the seeds for Barracuda, surely his most personal and heartfelt book to date, and I think his most accomplished.
What is the price of striving for career success? Are personal relationships a necessary casualty? And why is it that if one appears to fail, it seems that no-one wants to know you anymore, and even to yourself you can become a nothing?
Danny Kelly is a talented swimmer, but from the wrong side of the tracks—at least from the perspective of the snooty boys’ private school in Melbourne’s east to which he wins a sporting scholarship. Working-class, and a wog to boot, he cops his fair share of harassment, but soon his ability in the pool becomes his secret weapon against his abusers. Until, that is, his prowess starts to go awry (mentally as much as physically) and Danny is forced to find his base—and his future—from within, not without.
To start to summarise Barracuda though is to diminish this big, sprawling, ever-so-affecting book. And the structure is a feat in itself: Tsiolkas runs a dual narrative throughout, alternating between Danny’s schooldays, which are dominated in equal parts by swimming and loathing; and his life (as Dan) ten years on, which includes time spent with his partner Clyde in Scotland, the homeland, as it happens, of his migrant father Neal. And always the flashbacks to those formative poolside years ...
This is vintage Tsiolkas. He writes uncompromisingly about the way we live now, unafraid to address the many unspoken issues that taint our society—be they class division, racism, profligate government spending, craven Indigenous and refugee politics, or simply the pervasive ‘comfortableness’ and insularity of the Australian body politic. And for all the cultural critique there is no shortage of comic barbs: I guffawed audibly when Danny’s school is given the nickname ‘Cunts College’ near the beginning of the novel, and enjoyed Danny’s rumination on the finer points of his classmates spending their summer holidays in Portsea and Sorrento as opposed to Rye and Rosebud.
Perhaps what is new here though is the expanded emotional register: the emphasis on the importance of home, of fraternity, of belonging, of a language beyond words to forge our bonds. And learning how to communicate, particularly with one’s parents, as an essential rite of passage in our lives: Barracuda is such a lyrical, loving tribute to those that can help you not only fly through the water, but can make you fly through life as well.
Finally an aspect that I can’t help but read autobiographically: Dan declares his indebtedness to the discovery of literature in his 20s (‘Just as he had in water, he could lose himself in reading: mind and body became one’). Several wonderful little paeans to writers such as Faulkner, our own David Malouf, Chekhov and Graham Greene follow. When Dan is questioned by a librarian as to why he isn’t interested in ‘more modern stuff’ he responds that ‘the contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.’
To be sure none of those descriptors apply to our contemporary Tsiolkas—quite the opposite in fact. The German romantic poet Novalis once wrote: ‘The world must be romanticised. In this way we find its original meaning again.’ The beautiful ugliness that is Australia has found its chronicler in Tsiolkas, and we know ourselves better and are the richer for it. Our world has been...