AustLit

'Christos Tsiolkas’s new novel, an unflinching take on Christianity, is the work for which he will be best remembered, writes Geordie Williamson'

'The man traditionally held to have written about half of the New Testament is variously known as Saul of Tarsus, Paul the Apostle, and St Paul. Initially an enthusiastic persecutor of the earliest Christians, he underwent a dramatic conversion shortly after the Crucifixion, and it is on this moment that his life, and Christos Tsiolkas’s new novel, both turn. Damascus covers the period 35–87 CE, from shortly before Paul’s conversion until twenty or more years after his death. This chronology is not straightforwardly linear, with an assortment of narrators recounting their personal experiences, at various times and from various points of view, of Christianity’s birth and spread amid the brutal realities of the Roman Empire.' (Introduction)

'For the longest time, the Australia I knew was all myth. Early reading didn’t dispel this languid stereotype because part of that upbringing was made possible only by the claustrophobia of the culture itself. It was a narrow existence, filled with outback hardship or romance novels, bush memoirs (how embarrassing that I appear to have done the same thing) and writers from America or worse, England. In short, the authors I knew were not a representative sample of this country. This is not a problem if your range is bigger and broader, but to the extent that my range left my cultural Umwelt at all, it stopped at Not Without My Daughter. Life, then, is about pushing back the borders of our observable universe. Especially when such a quest reveals much about the place we call home.' (Introduction)

'In an interview that followed the publication of his 2013 novel Barracuda, Christos Tsiolkas declared that he ‘learnt to feel Australian by travelling to Europe’.¹ It’s a sentiment perhaps best expressed in Dead Europe (2005), a novel in which to be Australian is repeatedly compared to naivety or childishness. Such expressions suggest that for Tsiolkas, we can only understand Australian national identity in relief, an idea hearkening back to the earliest definitions of the nation made by its colonisers and continuing throughout Australia’s migrant and multicultural history.' (Introduction)