7 1/2

by Christos Tsiolkas

A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away, and he becomes lost in memory and beauty …

He also begins to tell us a story …

A retired porn star is made an offer he can't refuse for the sake of his family and future. So he returns to the world he fled years before, all too aware of the danger of opening the door to past temptations and long-buried desires. Can he resist the oblivion and bliss they promise?

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Novels, LGBT, Contemporary, Queer, Literature

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2021

About the author

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of nine novels: Loaded, which was made into the feature film Head-On, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe,which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award. He won Overall Best Book in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009, was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award, long listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize and won the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal for The Slap, which was also announced as the 2009 Australian Booksellers Association and Australian Book Industry Awards Books of the Year.
Barracuda is his fifth novel. Merciless Gods (2014) and Damascus (2019) followed.
He is also a playwright, essayist and screen writer. He lives in Melbourne.

Reviews

[Jill · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to stop reading this. It was awful. Part memoir and part dreadful storytelling (of a sort), it's hard to pinpoint where it went so wrong, from an author I have admired so much in the past. I have a fantasy that this book came about due to a collusion between editor-publisher-agent who told Christos that his life story was so fascinating that interspersing key memories from his childhood and early adulthood (heavily editorialised) with a half-baked story about an ex porn star living in Australia who gets an "offer he can't refuse" would be a brilliant book.

It isn't.

The memoir part is dreary. Others may find it deeply fascinating that Christos' "Uncle" Nikos winked at him in the shower block when he was 12 but I did not. I found myself skipping through entire pages of this kind of meandering memory making that made my eyes alternatively glaze over or close entirely. Added to this were the minutiae of everyday life in current days as Christos is on a writing retreat, where we are regaled with morning swims/walks/drives, daily phone calls, meals made of cannelini beans, coffees at the local cafe, brief morning greetings exchanged with locals and... oh who cares? It goes on and on, the tediousness of his day and his unrelieved internal narrative only broken by annoyingly complicated words to describe everyday things.

Apart from how utterly dull and convoluted the memoir part was, two other key beefs made it unreadable: the thing about beauty and the unfulfilled promise.

Beauty first. The author makes a big deal that he wants to write about beauty. Sorry, Beauty. He has arguments with a woman friend whom he seems to have, at best, conflicting feelings about (could it be that her criticism of his writing complicated his respect for her?) about how he's sick of Politics and Gender and Everything Else, but Beauty - now that's something he wishes to write about... which would be fine if we got enough Beauty, or even beauty, to wash over us as readers as the author brings beauty to life for us... but not so. We are regaled with so many descriptions of the BO from sweaty hairy armpits that my nose started to wrinkle whenever I saw the word "armpit" (which was many times). Other bodily functions were equally described in an anatomical way that evoked anything but beauty-- the worst of which is a description of a watery fart and diarrhea-y poop that is beyond disgusting - why on earth is this necessary? Even the "beautiful" bits (birds and wildlife and other bits of nature) had a scratchy, irritated feel to them. I had zero faith this author had even experienced beauty (except in his adoration of the naked male form, which we also get more than our fair share of descriptions of). This book does not bring the reader into a world of beauty, so this part of the book failed spectacularly for me.

Unfulfilled promise. A large portion of the blurb is an enticing piece on the "story within the story" -- how Christos has wanted to write about an ex porn star (Paul) living in Australia who gets a mysterious offer to spend 3 nights with an older gentleman in Los Angeles in exchange for $180,000 USD. I was intrigued by this - what a premise! And what a failure on the page! Firstly, the way this "story within a story" is told is partly through us looking over the shoulder as Christos brings various elements of this story to life -- his thoughts on how a particular character got his name or his physicality or whatever - we're in Christos' head rather than in the story itself. All that is a bit like a writing class, where the story of the ex porn star isn't actually being told -- what's being told is how Christos is writing the story. That's kinda okay and if we'd continued consistently, it may have worked. But then, without any warning, we jump into the story for one (or is it two, it's all blurring now I've stopped reading) chapter and we are actually reading the story of the ex porn star -- we've stopped looking over Christos' shoulder and now we're IN the story... So that was very discombobulating, like we'd been thrown off the train and into the jungle to fend for ourselves.

But THEN Christos does the unthinkable: he stops Paul's story at THE most intriguing point (after dinner on the first night of this three night assignation)! WTF???! It was just getting good! AND wasn't this posited as being a huge part of the story, as far as the blurb went? Nope, we just drop off a cliff -- "Paul has returned to Los Angeles. We will not see any more of his interactions with Conrad, won't know how they spent their remaining time together." WTF, again???!!! Paul then spends a drug infused set of days in LA followed by a drug infused set of days in Sacramento with a brother he hasn't seen in decades... who somehow thinks that Paul is there to steal his house. And whose partner/wife has sex with Paul in front of the brother. It's all so sordid and ugly. No beauty, or Beauty, here. Maybe its realistic, I don't know. But it was just hideous to read.

So that's it for me with Christos. He can tell a fantastic story ("The Slap" and "Barracuda" were two of the most astonishing stories of modern Australian lives, spectacularly written)... But this? Nope. Not an interesting memoir, not good storytelling. Just a hideous mishmash that manages somehow to be both ugly and boring at the same time.

[Janelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book Christos Tsiolkas weaves together three different narratives. It’s part memoir, he recalls his childhood, his greek heritage, his early experiences with regards to his sexuality and lots of other memories. Then there’s the strand following the author staying at a cottage attempting to write his next novel and lastly is the novel itself, the story of Paul, an old porn star who returns to the US to spend a weekend with a wealthy man. Initially I was worried that I wouldn’t enjoy this book like his previous books as the author says he doesn’t want to write about “rage and justice and politics” but I was soon immersed in the writing, before I knew it I was 100pages in. From writing about his memories, he shows how characters come into being. How music, art, and the natural world feed into it too. The novel parts were hard to look away from. In a seedier and uglier environment, there is still beauty. Tsiolkas always finds the humanity in his characters. While the author says he just wants to write about beauty, there is of course much more. How can there not be? Class, race, sexuality, the migrant experience, poverty, art, music, education, literature, climate change(several references to the bushfires) are all here. So in the end, yes, it’s a book about beauty but also home and belonging and I enjoyed reading it.

[Alexis Hall]

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

What’s with all the … um. Is the technical term autofiction? Especially in queer fiction? Although to be fair—apart from the autofictional (I think I hate that word?) elements, this otherwise has nothing in common with Edmund White’s A Previous Life, which I read recently.

In any case, 71/2 concerns the novelist, Christos Tsiolkas. Or, y’know, a semi-fictionalised version of the novelist Christos Tsiolkas called Christos Tsiolkas. He’s taken himself on a solitary writing retreat to the coast New South Wales, intending to write a novel—a novel he doesn’t want to be about politics, sexuality, race, gender, history, morality or the future. Because apparently—having lived through one global crisis after another—he’s bored of those things. Instead, he decides to write about beauty, winding together several narratives: one being the novelist’s experiences of the natural of the world during his retreat, another concerning his memories of his childhood and adolescence, a third being his thought processes in writing the novel about a former gay porn star that is yet another strand of the actual book. I guess what’s kind of remarkable about all this is that does come together into something coherent, meaningful and surprisingly organic, the story flowing effortlessly from memory into fiction, from reality into fiction, and then deeper into the meaning and structure of fiction itself.

And it is, by the way, a very beautiful book—whether it’s describing the New South Wales, the quiet tenderness of the fictionalised novelist’s long-term relationship, or the erotic fascinations of the various men who inhabit the text.

But I also don’t quite know what to make of it. That it has made me thoughtful—particularly about writing, the act of writing, the act of writing as a response to the trauma of the world—I am inclined to appreciate. And yet I’m also inclined to dispute both its central thesis (that beauty must be antithetical to and separate from politics, sexuality, race, gender, history, morality or the future) and its presentation of that thesis. I mean, it’s kind of a baller move to have a semi-fictionalised version of yourself tell the reader exactly what your novel is, and isn’t about, in its opening pages. The problem is, the layers of meta-text ended up being so dense to me that I got lost in them.

And listen, I know the point of Reading A Book TM isn’t to correctly interpret the closest thing you can manage to the original intent of the author (although when the author tells you their intent straight off that, in turn, sort of becomes difficult). But the thing is, I couldn’t tell to what extent we were meant to accept the position of the fictionalised novelist Christos Tsiolkas as the position of the non-fictionalised novelist Christos Tsiolkas and, therefore, the degree to which I was supposed to be taking that position at face value or whether I supposed to be viewing it critically. Because it’s not like Tsiolkas’s previous books haven’t been deeply concerned with, um, politics, sexuality, race, gender, history, morality or the future. And it’s not like it’s actually possible to create a work of art wholly insulated from those themes—especially if you’re talking about identity, which 7½ very much is, and even if you conceive of yourself as in flight from them.

So: are we to view the fictionalised novelist Christos Tsiolkas as fundamentally self-deluding? And 7½ as a novel inescapably about everything it claims not to be? On top of which I can’t quite shake the conviction that the whole sub-Wildean commitment to aesthetics above all was meant to … provoke me? And there’s nothing less provoking than something that wants to provoke you. It just makes me want to refuse the fence like an unruly pony.

I think the moment where I felt this most strongly was when the fictionalised novelist Christos Tsiolkas goes to hang out with an old friend, Andrea. He tells her he’s done with politics and the world, and she tells him she doesn’t think he’s the sort of writer who can write purely about beauty. The problem is, Andrea feels like little more than a straw…person, determined to live bitterness and strife (though the fictionalised novelist Christos Tsiolkas does not that she works for women’s shelters so she has reason to be angry). She doesn’t actually mount a single sensible challenge to the position of the fictionalised novelist Christos Tsiolkas, when there are several that could be made, and as such she’s more of an opportunity for him to, y’know, get his Grandpa Simpson on:

“I think we have to rip the pen out of the white man’s hand,” she says.

[…] “Enough with that moronic, undergraduate sloganeering. You can rip the pen or the keyboard from my white man’s hand but what are you proposing in its stead? The perpetual adolescent whine of victimhood? […] I go into a bookshop these days it is as if the shelves are filled with the agonised and narcissistic rantings of teenagers.”

Later, it becomes less Controversial By Numbers (although he does take a random potshot at The Colour Purple, of all books to complain about) and more personal: about how the fictionalised novelist Christos Tsiolkas is tired of anger and doesn’t feel either anger, or progressive politics, have achieved all that much. That, to me, feels more nuanced and more useful than what otherwise essentially amounts to “Twitter = bad.” Y’know, for a book that is so preoccupied with the way so many boundaries we are overly inclined to see as impermeable (fiction/reality/memory/compassion/the erotic/) are, in fact, the reverse 7½ strikes me as also somewhat stuck in self-inflicted dichotomies: that beauty can only exist outside of politics, that anger is always futile, and that if you take the pen/keyboard from white men all you’re left with are texts of victimhood.

Which is irritating, and not I think, in the way it wants to be irritating. Ultimately, its anti-political posturing just feels dishonest. Ungenerous in a way that the rest of the book is not. Because as I said above, it is also exactly what it sets about to be: beautiful, hopeful, unexpectedly soothing.

[hawk · Rating 3 out of 5]

for a book that on the surface/from the blurb sounded like it's kinda about sex work and porn, it's very much a book about connection.
not that these things are mutually exclusive, far from it, just not always so closely associated in mainstream narratives.
also the sexual description wasn't very erotic 🤣 especially the sex scenes involving a woman. tho perhaps this was deliberate too.

the novel contained alot about art, artistic process, writing... 💙

there were some nice descriptive pieces.
and some less good. some places felt a little repetitive.

I liked the layers. sometimes they got abit confusing, but I mostly liked them and how they were used - our main character (an echo/version of the author?) writing a novel about a character Paul, who plays a character Shaun for a while. peopling the novel/story he's writing with others who are at times based on people he knows/knew. it had quite an autobiographical feel to it. it also got abit confusing who was who at times! 😉 but maybe that was part of the point - we all potentially contain many facets, parallel lives...

the novel also contained alot about family, relationships, home... 🧡

and made me want to live by the beach 🙂🌊


🌟 🌟 🌟


accessed as a library audiobook, read by Lex Marinos.
I wasn't that into the reader. I needed to slow the playback/him down abit, which made for easier listening, but maybe a little slurred in places, and/or some errors/errs showed up more.

[Sheree | Keeping Up With The Penguins · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m quite skeptical of writers writing about writers, and I must say Tsiolkas’s latest hasn’t done much to change my mind. He goes the full Martin Amis with his main character: a mid-50s gay Greek writer named Christos Tsiolkas. I wanted to be generous in my reading, but this is really just one long lament about The Modern World. It’s more masterfully written than a forwarded chain email that’s been scanned by Norton Anti-Virus, but the vibe is the same.

My full review of 7 1/2 can be found on Keeping Up With The Penguins.

[Anna Baillie-Karas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. A man goes to a house on the coast to write a novel. He rejects the trend of writing about big issues and wants to write about (escape to?) the idea of beauty. What follows is a masterful blend of memoir and fiction as we see the author at work and the birth of a story.

Wonderful, strong prose, honest and original, it made me think about what a novel can do and look afresh at nature. Vivid descriptions of swimming in the ocean, bird life, first glimpses of a man’s body, and the gritty streets of LA. The language is superb: visceral, alive and poetic.

It’s not a simple ‘story within a story’ but an organic moving in the author’s mind from observing the ocean and the birds to the interior world of the story he’s creating. We see how his memories and life around him find their way into the story.

I loved the experience of reading it - it was like living a fantasy of living in solitude near the ocean writing a novel. We learn about observing the world, noting memories, sticking points and ephemeral moments of beauty.

It made me think of Milan Kundera’s definition of description: compassion for the ephemeral, salvaging the perishable.

The novel is infused with nostalgia, film references and appreciation of beauty, reminding me of Orhan Pamuk’s work (in particular The Museum of Innocence, My Name is Red and his memoir Istanbul ).

The sincerity and honesty of Tsoilkas bringing the reader into his process also brought to mind The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness by Kyung Sook-Shin, revealing her attempt to write a novel.

And more recently, The Luminous Solution by Charlotte Wood, an excellent book about the creative process.

Tsoilkas is sick of books that are full of ‘all this compassion and all this outrage’ and moralising. He resists what he calls worse than dead Art, ‘safe Art’. This whole passage resonates and I share his distrust of books that feel contrived to explore an issue (or worse, preach to the reader), or ‘careful’. It also made me think of David Foster Wallace’s warning to avoid the ‘tweed breeze’ of literature - the best books are not perfect.

So this novel tries to shut out world issues in favour of beauty. It’s a reminder to see the beauty in people, in the human body and in the everyday.

As to what makes a good novel, I don’t think it matters so much if it’s about big or small issues, if it captures something true and feels honest and uncontrived.

This book did that for me. I highly recommend it.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tsiolkas can write, and perhaps that affords him the indulgence of introspection. It didn't really pass muster with me; here's cheers to his no-fucks-to-give friend Andrea who all but rolled her eyes and reached for the wine bottle at the thought of a book about beauty.

[Declan Fry]

On page 20 of my advance copy of 7½, I insert a line in the margin: ‘Starting to sound like Sōseki’s Kusamakura here’. I had met the author of the passage – a man named Christos Tsiolkas – at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May, sidling up to the Clare Hotel breakfast bar at an enviably early hour each morning to enjoy fruit and festival conversation. As my pen hovers, I wonder how that gregarious and personable figure squares with the bittersweet register of this novel.

September 25. I skip ahead to the book’s finale and there, at page 339, is an explicit reference to Kusamakura. A short while later, Natsume Sōseki rears his head again: ‘Isn’t it from such questioning and interpretation that stories begin? If I am not going to begin with Morality or Politics or Race or Class or Gender or Sexuality, if I am going to resist the authority of Purpose, then how should I begin?’ Those three ‘begins’ might alert the reader: the conundrum of how to start (‘the number three is auspicious [...] Three is also possibility and risk’) is something 7½ never entirely resolves.

Our narrator is an authorial surrogate. His name is Christos Tsiolkas. He is struggling to write a novel. Titled Sweet Thing, it concerns Paul, a character inspired by real-life porn actor Paul Carrigan. Tsiolkas’s surrogate indulges in frequent walks and swims, hoping to encounter beauty and counter ‘the inevitable sag of my ageing body’. His progressive friends worry that he has gone soft in other ways: his ardour for changing the world seems to be in abeyance. ‘[P]olitics, sexuality, race, history, gender, morality, the future – all of them now bore me,’ he admits. Aggrieved by sanctimonious online posturing, he alternates between old-man-yells-at-cloud dyspepsia and reinventing Eileen Myles’s ‘Everyday Barf’: ‘The simple nature of our craft is how to vomit these stories out on a page. [...] By defining the novelist’s art as a hurling, a spewing, I am being deliberately crude, because I am writing at a time when the novel is unbearably timid.’

Certainly, few of us might enjoy or claim unalloyed pleasure in the accoutrements of our age. We were promised flying cars; instead they gave us hellsites. 7½ is largely a meditation on disappointment: failing ideological faith, failing body, failing novel.

Tsiolkas also considers the greatest artistic failure of all: the dysfunctional relationship between life and fiction. From Balzac’s painter Frenhofer in ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ to Henry James’s author Dencombe in ‘The Middle Years’, the work of art and art-making has often figured as a record of defeat. 7½’s narrator hopes to ‘separate my fiction from my truth’, yet finds the word ‘truth’ ‘inadequate’: ‘I am writing about my past [...] It clearly is as much memoir as it is fiction. The writing of one demands the same craft one uses for the other.’

Despite what Tsiolkas’s narrator may maintain about ‘craft’, the techniques of fiction are not necessarily identical to those of memoir: the felicity demanded by memoir is largely distinct from fiction’s imaginative licence. This difference explains, in part, why the two genres are distinct, quite apart from considerations of the reader’s need to distinguish social realism – with its desire to represent the world ‘out there’ – from questions of veracity peculiar to memoir and other temps perdu remembrance.

Woolf, Joyce, Genet (source of 7½’s epigraph), Duras, Bellow, Baldwin, Roth, Lorde (who described her ‘biomythography’ as ‘fiction built from many sources’), Coetzee, Murnane, Carey: all wrote from their lives; none purported to be creating anything other than fiction. Keep in mind that autofiction is a species of fiction – at least, as I believe it should be, when read with awareness of its conditioning fictional properties. This is how these authors’ novels succeeded: they played with the idea of borrowing from one’s life, from friends’ and family’s lives, without demanding this interpretation, or indeed any appraisal that would haphazardly draw the life in.

Repurposing creative narrative to serve fiction and memoir only gives it the freedom to fail as both. Tsiolkas knows this: his second novel, The Jesus Man (1999), weaved the voices of its characters alongside an ‘I’ voice that felt authorial without ever needing to imbue this narration with autofictional characteristics – sharing a name and profession with the author, for example, or metafictional gestures toward the creation of the book itself. Jump Cuts (1996), his brilliant and subtly experimental memoir-of-sorts (with Sasha Soldatow) similarly gave voice to both writers without claiming to be anything other than ‘non-fiction’, achieving a kind of sustained collaborative criticism in the process. When the narrator of 7½ describes hoping for ‘safekeeping between the story I tell of Paul and the story I tell of myself’, it is hard not to feel he would have been better served telling each story in separate books. Splicing the two together diminishes both and flatters neither.

Read on:
https://www.australianbookreview.com....

[Lee Kofman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was for me not a breath of fresh air but an urgently needed infusion! We need such a book so much now to rescue literature from its current earnestness, militancy, cowardice… The heart and moral pulse of this work, its call for beauty and joy in literature, its plea to divorce politics, or rather Politics, from artistic purposes made me feel less alone as a writer and a human being. I applaud Tsiolkas for his courage. This book will be my touchstone in my future writing and not only for its content but also for how cleverly, elegantly, it sits between fiction and memoir, narrative and discursive prose, refusing to choose a side, greedy for whatever it can fit between its pages.

[Kate Huon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christos continues to produce work that is not only a sheer delight to read but honest and confronting in style.

This is a novel within a personal narration within a story. The style is not for everyone but how… I did love to read something different and unpredictable.

7 1/2 is Christos describing beauty, how he see’s beauty. His choice of language is simply poetic and I savoured each of the scenes he created.

[Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

The seamless blending of fiction and memoir is sublime. A book that neatly encapsulates the confusion and hopelessness of recent years, but which exalts the beauty of nature. I saved this book to read during a couple of days where I was on my own and savoured every word….I plan to read it again next summer at a beach house in Narooma.

[Steve Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing story. I'd never heard of autofiction before and had to look it up. (Combination of fiction and autobiography).

The story moves effortlessly between Christo, his getting away from Melbourne to work on his new book and the characters in the book.

Christo is Tsiolkas, but you wonder how much of Tsiolkas is in Paul, the main character in the book being written by Paul.

Loved the story and the way the characters leap off the page.

[Ron Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my sixth Tsiolkas book. Richard Flanagan and Tsiolkas are two Australian male authors who I deliberately read whenever they have a new publication. I have heard both speak at Writers’ Festivals and other literary events. I find them challenging and rewarding authors. Their books are never an easy read and I feel I have made an accomplishment when I finish one.
At the outset I did find this book somewhat of a self-indulgence. If you are after a straightforward novel with a beginning, middle and end then look elsewhere.
The reader should ask is this a memoir, a novel or a stream of conscious? There are three strands braided through this book. The author escapes the city to write in the solitude of the south coast of New South Wales, a fictious story of a husband and wife with a past life as actors in pornographic films and the author reflecting on his childhood and the people and experiences that made him the person he is today.
A few reviews I read mentioned autofiction, didactic fiction and metafiction so I went off on a tangent investigating these terms. I will let the reader do the same.
I am a few years older than Tsiolkas and I am heterosexual, I found his accounts of discovering his own sexuality challenging. At his age sexual identity was not part of my own make up. Undoubtedly it was more challenging accepting one’s homosexuality identity. I wonder if his uncles are still alive to read his reflections.
Tsiolkas is a master writer. His use of language, especially in the descriptions of the natural world around his writing recluse.
It is a long time ago that I read D.H. Lawrence and Tsiolkas’ writing has a Lawrence feel to it. Naturally, the sex references are raw, banal and twenty-first century.
Tsiolkas says that he wanted to write about beauty. The scenes that stay in my mind are of hard sex with stiff penises and wet vaginas, (Tsiolkas uses the “C” word.) with the pungent smell of sweaty, hairy arm pits and male bodies. I never read heterosexual love stories and homosexual love interest me even less, so the affair between Paul and Conrad was melodious and boring. I found the discussions of pornography to be of a similar vein.
The struggles of Greek immigrants and the prejudice suffered by so many “New Australians” has always interested me. Tsiolkas writes from experience.
In my high school years, I became enthralled with the works of Fredrico Fellini and in 8 ½ Fellini reflects on his film making. Tsiolkas does the same with his writing
For all its qualities this is one of Tsiolkas’ lesser texts. In parts it was a return to the style of Merciless Gods, brutal, confrontational and dark. I enjoyed the journey of the book, but I felt vacant at the end. I did not bond with any of the characters and Tsiolkas’ ruminations about life did not add meaning to my own life. I don’t regret reading 7 ½ but it did not have the effect on me that his other texts had.

[Chris Waterford · Rating 2 out of 5]

The main character (who seems to be the author) says "Everything begins with the erotic"---and he sets out to prove this with his three intertwined stories---only one of which has any interest for me. I get frustrated at the delay getting back to it---and I tire of the preoccupation with sex but one quote rings true. "The novel is masturbation"---it's out of context but it fits for me.
5.5/10

[P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is wonderful when your favorite writer and you converge on a worldview around the same time.

I was initiated into the world of left-wing intellectualism when I was 16, by a random book of essays on Tamil cinema I sneakily read at Landmark. Not able to afford the book, I returned everyday to read a new essay until the security folks grew suspicious of me.

The book (whose title I cannot remember) had essays on several well-known movies, some of which were my favorites, and it cast a completely new light on the society I lived in. It opened my eyes to the injustices and historical oppression around me, and alerted me to the ways in which our movies condition us to perpetuate patriarchy. I sought out similar literature with a zeal, and became a passionate liberal. I spent most of my twenties reading The Guardian, doomscrolling, despairing over the state of the world, outraging over injustice after injustice that the world seemed to mete out every day with a relentless rhythm. Twitter sustained it, carefully guarding me from alternate viewpoints and positive goings on, securing me in an echo chamber of doom and gloom. It took a toll on my mental health eventually, and I decided to stop following the news altogether. I uninstalled Twitter. I kept to myself. And books were my refuge.

In due course, I came to see what the outrage and the despair that most people exhibit on social media actually were: just a performance. These people living the most comfortable lives, pretending to despair over the downtrodden, do not lift a finger to change anything, and believe that their part is over just by putting out a few tweets. And continuing to focus on negative aspects of the world will wear out anybody in the long run. The moral high ground that we liberals cling on to is alienating the non political populace, and we often talk down to people instead of talking with them. I believe any true liberal should be open to criticism and change, but with cancel culture and the trap of isms, we have gotten more dogmatic instead of pragmatic.This is not to take anything away from people who are fighting oppression or are victims of the status quo - my issue is only with theoretical anger and performative compassion of the privileged folk (who populate the majority of the left, at least on social media) that does not translate to any good deeds in real life, not with genuine compassion. I remain a steadfast liberal (though I now refuse to see the world in the black-and-white terms that we are conditioned to), but I am tired of social media and now believe that what I do is more important than what I say or pretend to believe.

The anger and panic on Twitter has slowly bled on to much of contemporary literature, and the clouds of doom and gloom follow you in every award nominated book. An essay in the Sydney review of books (https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/revie...) picks apart this phenomenon: about how privileged liberals make everything about themselves and their compassion and their anger instead of focusing on the true victims of the status quo.

7 1/2 (not sure what it refers to; is it the Indian belief regarding 7.5 years of bad luck? lol) sees Christos Tsiolkas delve into autofiction. It starts with a stunning first paragraph (always a pleasure) and it is a novel about a novelist writing a novel. He retreats from the world to get out from all the noise and to create. He revels in the beauty of nature (though having the option to break away from regular life and having access to abundant nature is a first-world privilege in itself). He isolates, he experiences, he creates. He tries not to let politics cloud his consciousness. He is exhausted by the anger and the constant outrage. He channels characters from his childhood to the characters in his novel. He reminisces (very relatably) about his working class upbringing, and about how his parents with rough hands toiled so that his hands would remain soft. He remembers the awakening of his sexuality. He remembers the movies and music and books and pornography and art that are ingrained into his consciousness. This novel is a creative patchwork of memories, themes, and sensuality. But what we have here is a mellowed down Tsiolkas (that's the point, yes), and it is ultimately not as arresting or passionate as his other novels. It meanders and bores sometimes. There is a lack of solid ground. It is interesting that the "in between" mentioned at the end of this novel is the title of his next one.

There is more I want to say, but I am content to quote from Tsiolkas for now.

--
The burst of birdsong is set in motion by their flight. An arc of white rises into the sky, a family of cockatoos swooping and then descending onto the eucalypts. Abruptly and in unison their squawking ceases, replaced by the calls of lorikeets. I turn away from the forest canopy, half close my eyes, and I can hear the melodic warble of the honeyeater, its song as tender and consoling as the purring of bees. It is an hour till sunset and the sky is aglow with magnificent slants of light. The inlet waters shimmer and beyond is the defiant blue of the ocean. This is an eastern sea. It fades slowly into night and awakens magnificent and overpowering in the morning.
--
I am suspicious of the homogenising effect of globalisation and cosmopolitanism and I suspect that ingrained in every manifestation of those worldviews is a rapacious greed for the material over the spiritual. I wish to be—and try to be— a universalist in every human exchange; yet what I truly long for is the specific and the local. In essence, I am egalitarian in my hopes and conservative when it comes to the immutability of human nature. I think the right wing's cataclysmic failure has been its entanglement with the vilest of racist dogma and the equally cataclysmic failure of the left has been its derision of the notions of individual freedom and of independent thought. A pox on both their fucking houses.
--
I do want to write a good story. But I no longer trust the judgements of my age. The critic now assesses the writer's life as much as her work. The judges award prizes according to a checklist of criteria created by corporations and bureaucrats.
And we writers and artists acquiesce, fearful of a word that might be misconstrued or an image that might cause offence.
I read many of the books nominated for the globalised book prizes; so many of them priggish and scolding, or contrite and chastened. I feel the same way about those films feted at global festivals and award ceremonies. It's not even that it is dead art: it's worse, it's safe art. Most of them don't even have the dignity of real decay and desiccation: like the puritan elect, they want to take their piety into the next world. Their books and their films don't even have the power to raise a good stench. The safe is always antiseptic.
--
I know what will be said about it and, even if I agree with the righteousness of the sentiments, I will be nauseated by the smugness and the puritanical zeal with which they are pronounced.
--
'I know that there is so much happening that should concern me.' I shut my eyes and recited her list. 'Crisis and revolution, war and bushfires, the pandemic and the shifts in the superpowers. All that and more. But there is nothing I can offer anymore to illuminate any of that. And these days, when I read novels that are all crisis and revolution, war and bushfires, I am nauseated by their arrogance and their naivety. Every bloody novelist sounds the same now, whether they are American or Austrian or Angolan or Andalusian or Australian. All the same cant, all the same desire to shape the world to their academic whims and aspirations. All this compassion and all this outrage and all this empathy and all this sorrow and all this fear and all this moralising and nor one sentence of surprise in any of it? I puffed furiously at my cigarette. "Not one moment of beauty. I don't want to write that fucking novel."
--
I don't care about politics anymore, and truth be told I don't think I have for a long time. I'm tired of being angry all the time. I could cope with the anger when I was younger, and maybe I'm fooling myself and my memory is false, but I also remember lots of joy and laughter and celebration in our politics. Fuck!' And as I release the expletive, I slap the table, startling her. 'Even at the height of AIDS, even amid that tragedy, we fucking laughed and danced. That isn't what politics is anymore. It's just one long endless and wearying moan. And our secret terror is that most of us know we have nothing really to moan about. Not here, not in this place.'
--
misinterpreted it as emotional reticence, but I had come to understand that it was a necessary protection for himself, a means of guarding against the intensity of emotions, when they come to overwhelm us: his speaking distantly meant that, as if by a supreme effort of will, he was challenging his fears, denying them ground to gain root. And in that strange yet comforting manner by which habits and tics and mannerisms are transmitted in a couple —that prosaic occurrence, say, of finishing each other's sentences or finding oneself gradually imbued with the anxiety of their phobia (Simon now has a trepidation of reptiles he never felt before he met me, and my breath now shortens when I find myself in a crowded lift or in the middle of a dense mob)—I no longer am aggrieved or made defensive by his reserve at such a moment. Instead, I understand that these are precisely the times he requires comfort.
--
I relish the in-betweenness of long drives, those canny hours between departure and arrival, in which the whole of the world suddenly drops away.
Of course, I can turn on the radio, the world can flood back in, but there are long stretches of highway where radio waves struggle to penetrate, so that there is only the crackle and spitting of the depleted and vanquished signals. In such moments I am an astronaut in my car, and the drive along the straight empty roads is a flinging into space. I avoid driving in the city, and when I have to, I fill the silence in the vehicle with sound: music, radio, interviews, podcasts. Yet on these open roads-the shooting majesty of the eucalypt forests on either side, or the dense lush tunnel of effervescent temperate forest; the parched endless plains and scrublands, the titan inland seas of red or yellow or gold desert; or skirting the serene infinity of the ocean—I find myself shrugging off my frustrations and disappointments with my nation; it is on these open roads that I rediscover it as country and as land, as vista and as panorama, as earth and sky, and I fall in wild love with it again. The open road, vast, seemingly without end.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is 7½ the most 'Tsiolkas' of all of Tsiolkas's books? The very fact that the main character, an author, renounces writing about race, class, religion, and sexuality, and instead wants to write about beauty (which turns out to be a story about retired porn-star, Paul, and of course slides into all sorts of commentary on sexuality, money, loyalty and self-image), allows Tsiolkas to tackle all of his favourite subjects by default. Because of course, no matter how hard we try to get away from politics, race, class, religion, and sexuality, we can't - that is life.

And so, since the fire and the pandemic, reminded again of the meaning of labour - for it was the firefighters, nurses, doctors, cleaners who sacrificed - it is any wonder that my notions of how to write and what to write have changed? No more screeds to capital-J Justice and to capital-S Society and to capital-L Love and to capital-E Equlity and to capital-R Revolution: how can those of us with soft hands even contemplate such forgery?

7½ is a work of auto-fiction and Paul's part provides a story within a story (which actually reminded me of the nineties film, Indecent Proposal ). I attended an author talk when 7½ was launched, and Tsiolkas revealed that he'd had the idea for Paul's story for many years, and had tried to turn it into a script. There was no interest in it as a movie, and he had all but abandoned it when he realised that there was a way to use the story. As a result, in 7½, our author intersperses scenes from Paul's story (which is titled Sweet Thing), with his own stream-of-consciousness reflections on his childhood, his sexuality, literature, music, the pleasure of swimming, his friend Andrea*, and even the meals he makes for himself.

This commentary is so natural, and so intimate that some parts feel as if your are crossing personal boundaries. I think that's what Tsiolkas always does best - takes the reader to a point of discomfort; puts into words the worst of us, or the things we turn away from; questions thoughts or behaviour that we might try to justify or dismiss. Of a moment when, as a child, our author, Christo, realises the differences between himself and his mother -

We were not one body. She was a woman, and I was becoming a man, and from now on we would be keeping secrets from one another. Of course, my mother would have known this already, and over the following years I realised that the revelation of her loneliness and her griefs and her fears was never a comprehensive confession... It was my own naivety that was exposed. Daughters and fathers must have a similar moment of dissonance, with the daughter's first menstruation, or the accidental glimpse of the dark thatch of her father's pubic hair... The love need not be shattered; nevertheless, there is the beginning of an estrangement.

So, did I like it? I'm not sure I've 'liked' any of Tsiolkas's books, but nonetheless I'm compelled to read them. 7½ has some grotty scenes but I admire how viscerally I feel things when I'm reading his work.

There are moments of beauty in this book (beauty that is familiar to me, anyway). I particularly enjoyed his descriptions of the ocean and swimming. There was a wonderful bit about striding into the ice-cold water likened to an 'axe to the knees' (I didn't mark the passage and despite going back through the pages, I couldn't locate it).

This is an eastern sea. It fades slowly into night and awakens magnificent and overpowering in the morning.

But did Tsiolkas get his story about beauty? The old adage, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, might apply, but I think Tsiolkas did come to the conclusion that beauty requires context, that it sits alongside other things that we feel and sense -

Like Paul, I too am mindful of my fortune in this world. I am aware of the world's beauty. And like Paul, I will wear my shame till my end: for we know there are worlds without love, neither filial nor compassionate.

Lastly, read this book in hard copy if you can - Tsiolkas references an old black and white photograph of a boxer and sailors, and Manet's painting, The House of Rueil , throughout the book, and each is featured on the inside book jacket. Van Morrison's song, Sweet Thing , also becomes central to the story.

3.5/5 Consistent.

*Andrea is author Angela Savage, right?

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

A middle-aged author, Christos, leaves his husband, Simon, in Melbourne and travels to a lovely and isolated coastal community in New South Wales to write a book about beauty whilst, at the same time, being surrounded by the beauty of nature in all its forms.
Part of the novel tells of the author's upbringing in a Greek migrant family and his early sexual desires and experiences, from childhood onwards. These were quite graphic and detailed in places, which was okay although I found the regular references to 'sweaty armpits' a bit repugnant.
At the same time as the author is telling of his days of lazing, swimming and walking in the beautiful environment, he starts writing a novel about Paul, a former American gay porn star, now living in Australia and married with a teenage son, who is approached with an offer from an older American man - the man, who is in love with Paul's gay porn character, is offering an unprecedented amount of money for Paul to stay with him at his American home for three days. Paul accepts the offer....
I have enjoyed previous novels by this author but, to be honest, was glad to finish this one. The best part was where he was describing the coastal town where he was working on his book - the natural beauty of the area really came to life for me - but much of the rest left me a bit cold. Sadly, not my cup of tea and where the title comes from I simply do not know! - 4.5/10.

[Tony Tone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tsiolkas’ most successful novel was the Slap, given the frequent references to masturbation in his latest novel, it might have been titled the Fap. More Meta than Facebook, 71/2 suffers from an identity crisis is it a memoir, short story, critique of the influence of intersectional politics on fiction or self abasing erotica.

[Levi Huxton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The erudite and opinionated Tsiolkas is somewhat at odds with the Australian literary landscape: a queer Greek-Australian intellectual who broke into mainstream readership with The Slap and has been wrestling with notoriety ever since, never more than with 7 ½.

There’s ½ of a novel here (which comes after 7 others) and ½ of a metafictional reflection on the role of the artist (much like Fellini’s 8 ½ then).

That half-novel is Sweet Thing, a story of class, sex and morality in which an ex-porn star returns from Australia to the US to spend a few nights with an ageing fan in exchange for a tidy sum.

The metafictional part concerns a character names Christo – by all descriptions a version of the author – who isolates in a sea-side shack to write Sweet Thing, and wonders in the process about the role of the writer in these times we live in.

Christo has been writing for years about Identity, Race, Politics, History and Sexuality (all capitalized), possibly from a place of outrage and certitude. Finding himself in a world mired with outrage and polarized certitude, he turns inwards, embracing beauty and sensuality – starting with his own burgeoning desires growing up - as a way back to purpose.

In one chapter, Christo has an argument with a friend about the value of his writing. It’s a virtuosic and brutal moment of vanity, honesty and friendship and a superlative piece of prose, a brilliant reminder of why we should care.

7 ½ is an intriguing and worthwhile experiment, a good fit with the pandemic years during which it was written (though perhaps one only afforded commercially successful writers).

Both parts are in dialogue with each other, yet I felt neither went far enough. The novel yearns for completion, the memoir for authenticity. If Christo is only a version of Christos, what are we to believe? If this novel is about doubt and ambivalence, why do Christo’s assertions feel so unequivocal?

In every reader perhaps exists a version of the book they’re reading: the version they were hoping for. They’re entitled to that version, certainly not owed it. In mine, Tsiolkas uses the project to learn to live with – and own up to – ambivalence, a place where beauty and politics do co-exist, even if not harmoniously, as I believe they have in his towering body of work.

[Caren · Rating 5 out of 5]

My challenge here is to adequately convey my admiration for Tsiolkas’ achievement in bringing readers this highly creative, highly intelligent, and powerfully compelling novel. Most striking, for me, is its genre-bending structure and narrative: not quite fiction, not quite memoir, but a superb blending of both. Tsiolkas is both the author of the novel and the author-character of a book in the process of being written: “Sweet Thing”. The third character is Paul, the main character of the emerging novel, a retired porn actor whom the writer has lived with in his head, struggling to portray his bisexuality with dignity and love.

In the author’s declaration that he has dedicated his writing to exploring BEAUTY, he demands of himself that he reject the contemporary novel’s usual scope of politics, sexuality, race, history, gender, morality, and the future. Tsoilkas skilfully explores many forms of beauty in stunning prose: sensual, sexual, erotic, natural (landscape) and in his references to literature, painting, music and, emphatically, in the loving relationships he recounts from his own childhood (and that of his writer-persona). Particularly his descriptions of the Australian coastal scenes stimulate the reader’s sense of the beauty that surrounds us once we leave the cities.

The creative process of writing itself is observed and, perhaps, is reflected in his reference to Fellini’s “8½” in the title. I’m still working that through. The division between author and character is dissolved in the novel, to the extent that I was often unsure whether the memories were those of the author himself or of the author-character. But, rather than disturb me, I enjoyed this melding of the two sides of the “mirror” that Tsoilkas writes about. This is a novel, at times confrontational and, at all times, provocative and stimulating. I'm certain I will reread it.

[Sue Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

71/2 is very different to Tsiolkas' other books. They were narrative driven and heavily focussed on social or cultural issues. This book is about beauty and about creation (as in he, the main character, is taking a break on the coast to write his next novel). It is languid, erotic and very sensual. He (the writer - is it memoir? is it fiction?) is very transparent that he does not want to write a mainstream novel and it steps outside the confines of the mainstream mores and embraces sensuality in everyone including children. I read it as a sensual novel not a sexual novel. It has taken me longer to read as I find the time to devote chunks of reading time to really enjoy his writing. In a nutshell I love it and I am enjoying his skill, the insights to the creation of a written work, of building characters and his descriptions of the coastal region (I think south coast NSW). This is a 5 and 1/2 stars book (out of 5).

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second book that I have read by Tsiolkas and it was every bit as brilliant as the first (Barracuda). Excellent plotting and characters, both serious, humorous and sometimes shocking, and with a playful approach to the process of novel writing. I have one other on my to-be-read list, but glad there are others to add to it.

[Malcolm · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure if this is more than a collection of extracts from a notebook given a loose structure to pull into book form. Whether it is or not, it felt disjointed and a little pointless, as in going nowhere / getting nowhere.

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

I can understand why this wouldn’t be for everyone, but I really enjoyed the whimsical simplicity of it, but this doesn’t mean it’s simplistic, which is part of its overall craft and charm. Lazy days mixed with ennui, memories and appreciation amount to something way bigger than the sum of its parts, which I suppose is a decent description of literary fiction in general.

The narrator/author retains a childlike curiosity about the world around him, and adds to that a puppyish enthusiasm, embracing every aspect of it, squeezing out every last drop, which is as pleasant as it is infectious. What came through strongest of all for me in this was a genuine love and profound appreciation for life and especially the simpler things, well enjoyed. Though in saying that this lost momentum towards the end and just kind of petered out, which was a disappointing way to end an otherwise really enjoyable book.

[Alonso · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never read a book like this before and it blew my mind to see how Tsiolkas was able to blend autofiction and meta so organically. This really is one of a kind book.

[Julian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the prose in this book almost completely indigestible. It is so full of complex words (especially in the first third of the book) that it reads as academic writing. This fact serves to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction, a theme enhanced by the meta author-is-protagonist-on-a-novel writing-retreat storyline. I suspect the aspects I didn’t like were the exact things the novel aimed to achieve, but it felt like it was trying to accomplish too much and I found myself eagerly waiting to be done with the book.

I liked the story within the story and the slumdog millionaire-like reveals of how his life informed the narrative. Also the frequent descriptive analyses of images/paintings.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing structure, so well done - a story within a memoir. Also a love letter to his partner and to Nature. Very intimate, at times sentimental. My favourite bits depicted a great love for the environment, especially the water and the coast. It feels like a last book, a summing up and a reckoning. I hope not. Later listened to this on audio and absolutely loved it. The different threads came together easily. Wonderful voice of Lex Marinos.

[Richard Dearden · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have finished the Christos Tsoilkus 7 1/2 book. It is a book about thinking about ideas that the author might write about and does, in a way, write about them. His perspective is a little bit interesting, but only slightly more interesting than listening politely to an opinionated person while wondering when you might be able to slip away.

It is sort of interesting, the mixed treatment of beauty and pornography. You have to admire the admissions of beat sex and ghastly catastrophes of anal sex. Didn't Oscar Wilde say something like: You shouldn't do anything that you can't talk about at a dinner party? Well, for CT's middle class, middle brow devotees, there you go.

But there is nothing new, really, or anything to change your view on the world. Doris Lessing wrote about the contrast of drab post war London with a visit to Paris (Golden Notebook?). There she witnessed, in the grand foyer of the opera house, a beautiful young woman coming into her sexuality and allure literally put on display for the theatre crowd to admire and complement as they passed her on the stairs. Something that could no way happen in London. CT does something similar in his musings on the beautiful adolescent on the beach, contrasting the Greek Orthodox sensual permissibility and Protestant puritanism. But less well.

Somewhere he brings in the idea of Original Sin in his musings - wants us to accept its legitimacy to explain the badness of people. Well. No. He includes a meeting with an old friend and an argument that arose from the narrator's change in political views and priorities. The old friend says something like: I didn't realise you weren't left wing anymore. Oh God. I'm glad that I have more interesting conversations with my own friends. From this I am reminded of my pleasure in reading Robert Dessaix whose books have similar accounts and thoughts arising from meetings with friends and chance encounters and meanderings. But I am delighted and intrigued by these. And there are things that make me laugh aloud and kick my feet. Then I realise that there is another thing this book by CT seems to lack entirely: humour.

[Robert Bland · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is an unspoken contract between the writer and the reader - on the one hand a preparedness to share, inform, instruct, or entertain, and on the other, an openness, a patience, and a trust. It says - I will take you to this other place, if you will but let me. In 7 1/2, Tsiolkas insists that the writer must bravely confront the reader without fear of ridicule or judgement. As with Damascus, the brutal story of family disintegration, abuse, and drug addiction, is told beside the pure qualities of love and decency and faithfulness. Tsiolkas spares us nothing. The fusion of beauty and ugliness emerges again and again, as he reveals the sources of inspiration for his characters in a developing novel. Early in the novel, Tsiolkas shares a story of an encounter as an adult, with a schoolboy in a lavatory. The boy welcomes the sexual act, but the writer decides that he cannot take the risk and escapes with embarrassment. Yet his honest regret is that he did not tell the boy how beautiful he was! The book is full of these rich events - morally confronting but intensely human. Tsiolkas invites no judgement and expects us to understand the brutal truth of the moral choices we have to make in life.
The structure of the book is complex, relying on the writer's efforts to create the characters and plot of a novel in the making, and then telling that improbable story. Both the writer and his characters confront their frailties. The action locates both the writer and his chief character in places of separation from family and supports, on either side of the Pacific, both confronting a complicated family history, and both, eventually, seeking the security of home. The pornography and drug taking serve to point to the more basic moral questions about love and loyalty. Tsiolkas is kind to all his characters, and we're left admiring them and their capacity to make hard choices.
We're told early in the novel that he wants to write about beauty. There are long and unnecessarily detailed accounts of the land, sea and skies, and the birds and animals that live around his seaside holiday home. We hear a lot about the joy of swimming in the ocean. I found the device of splashing the beauties of the environment about as a sort of relief from the tough human drama a little too obvious. Enough of the cockatoos! Get on with the story! On the other hand, as the reader/writer contract requires, maybe I just need to leave the driving to the writer while I enjoy the view!
I found 7 1/2 a challenging and disturbing read. The writing is lush, engaging, and powerful. Tsiolkas has honoured his pledge to write bravely and truthfully, careless of whether his reader will be offended. I found the resolution of the novel satisfying, and for me the beauty that Tsiolkas was so keen to write about emerges not in the landscape, but in the humanity of the characters he creates for us.

[Sharon Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever an insightful.
This was an interesting commentary on the process and escape used by the author in order to write a book that has been swimming around in his head for many years.
A fabulous glimpse into the life and mind of one of Australia's most raw, honest and confrontational authors.
As always, I was challenged and confronted in some parts and intrigued and bewildered in others. I would expect nothing less from Tsiolkas.
A raw and fierce look at the stark balance found in beauty and the fear and darkness that may be simmering beneath it's surface.
Tsiolkas has been once of my favourite authors for nearly 20 years. His books never fail to unnerve or frazzle me. It is his raw approach to confrontational topics in the everyday that always leaves me in a state of contemplation and awe.
As always, I eagerly await his next masterpiece.