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A review by captainfez
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
5.0
Nominated for the 2009 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award and winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (South East Asia and South Pacific Region), The Slap is the latest work by novelist Christos Tsiolkas.
It's the fifth published book for Tsiolkas, who rose to prominence with the novel Loaded, later filmed with Alex Dimitriades as Head On, and continued to gather a reputation for challenging fiction - particularly for the bleak The Jesus Man and the uncompromising Dead Europe.
The basic premise of The Slap is simple; at a family-and-friends barbecue, a man slaps another's child. The rest of the work initially seems to concentrate on the fallout from this act, but it's a disguise - Tsiolkas uses it as the crowbar to lever the cover off individuals and examine their feelings.
Told from a series of different characters' perspectives, the novel serves as a series of thumbnail sketches. The protagonists' thoughts and feelings are revealed, and the author is fearless in his exploration of
the taboo, skewering differences between gender, nationality, belief and ethics with honesty that's as brutal as it is simply put.
Tsiolkas' prose is never florid. It's sometimes clinical in its approach - the profane and the unspeakable aren't romanced or said for shock value; they're simply stated, with the implicit understanding that it's the reader's role to take from the text what they will, that This Is How It Is. There's never a sense of authorial judgement with the description of each character's foibles; rather, the reader has a true sense of inner thought, of self-judgement.
The Slap is not a novel that's comfortable to read. Each character has elements that are distasteful, even shocking. But it is a stunning work, and compulsively readable. You will recognise parts of yourself -
perhaps parts of your self that you would rather not admit existed - in the stories of those present at the titular incident. The aftermath of one afternoon's frustration is not just about child control; it's about
parts of the human condition we don't often pause to consider.
It's the fifth published book for Tsiolkas, who rose to prominence with the novel Loaded, later filmed with Alex Dimitriades as Head On, and continued to gather a reputation for challenging fiction - particularly for the bleak The Jesus Man and the uncompromising Dead Europe.
The basic premise of The Slap is simple; at a family-and-friends barbecue, a man slaps another's child. The rest of the work initially seems to concentrate on the fallout from this act, but it's a disguise - Tsiolkas uses it as the crowbar to lever the cover off individuals and examine their feelings.
Told from a series of different characters' perspectives, the novel serves as a series of thumbnail sketches. The protagonists' thoughts and feelings are revealed, and the author is fearless in his exploration of
the taboo, skewering differences between gender, nationality, belief and ethics with honesty that's as brutal as it is simply put.
Tsiolkas' prose is never florid. It's sometimes clinical in its approach - the profane and the unspeakable aren't romanced or said for shock value; they're simply stated, with the implicit understanding that it's the reader's role to take from the text what they will, that This Is How It Is. There's never a sense of authorial judgement with the description of each character's foibles; rather, the reader has a true sense of inner thought, of self-judgement.
The Slap is not a novel that's comfortable to read. Each character has elements that are distasteful, even shocking. But it is a stunning work, and compulsively readable. You will recognise parts of yourself -
perhaps parts of your self that you would rather not admit existed - in the stories of those present at the titular incident. The aftermath of one afternoon's frustration is not just about child control; it's about
parts of the human condition we don't often pause to consider.