摘要：I’ve been addicted to Christos Tsiolkas for years because his novels make me uncomfortable. They confront me with racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, pornography, drug use and hard-core sex, and it’s relentless. In each and every one of his books he paints these same issues with bold strokes in dark hues, and I’ve never cared that he’s predictable (which seems such a petty word for a writer of his power). Again and again he asks his readers to contemplate what it means to be Australian, what it means to be a migrant Australian, what it means to be a migrant man living in Australia, what it means to be a migrant gay man living in Australia, and I’m always newly exhilarated returning to those questions because Tsiolkas does tension well. He writes characters who are fuelled by anger, who do shocking things, whom we somehow recognise in our own selves.
