The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
Author Christos Tsiolkas recently made a stopover in Beijing to promote his latest novel The Slap. E-mails were sent, literary festival organisers were contacted and I was granted a 30-minute interview. I’m going to be honest: Editing this interview was tough for me. In fact, I wouldn’t call this an interview as much as a really interesting conversation. Everything Tsiolkas said was worth discussing over at least two bottles of wine. Of course, me being me, I had to stamp my own brand of clumsiness on the experience. There we were, sitting in a small café that had been transformed into a lecture theatre for the evening, and I just had to sit on the stage. Not on one of the 100 seats that filled the room, no, I had to sit on the floor. Tsiolkas, the lovely man that he is, quickly moved himself from his comfy chair to sit on the grubby stage next to me. I had managed to get a very well known, well-respected Australian author to sit in grime because I couldn’t sit down like a normal person. Realising what I’d done, I apologised and told him that he didn’t have to come down to my level (both literally and metaphorically speaking). But Tsiolkas seemed more than happy to relinquish his comfort for a close-up view of the stage platform’s chipboard surface. I mentioned that my penchant for dusty floors must be an old Melbourne habit developed over years of sitting on tram steps. We both shared a silent moment, reminiscing about our beloved trams, then I fiddled with my voice recorder and began the interview. Continue reading
I, Kandel 