John Tesarsch

Romantic comedy is a complete departure from John Tesarsch's previous literary fiction novels (The Philanthropist, The Last Will and Testament of Henry Hoffman, on my TBR and my favourite, Dinner with the Dissidents, which was shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award. But like Toni Jordan's rom-coms for the thoughtful reader, When Jokers Were Kings has its serious side too. Set against the backdrop of the recent banking royal commission and brutal retrenchments in that industry, the novel raises questions of integrity at the corporate and individual level, while also revealing the dreariness of doing a job that offers no fulfilment.

When Engelbert (Bertie) Jones wows the audience at the bank's Christmas party with his heartfelt Elvis impersonation, it sets him on a path towards forging a new identity. With a body much like Elvis's in his (a-hem) later years, and a mother who treats him like a child, Bertie struggles to be a romantic hero, that is, until Jasmine a.k.a. Jazz runs into cancel culture with her Michael Jackson tribute show.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/07/05/when-jokers-were-kings-by-john-tesarsch/… (plus d'informations)

Unsurprisingly, since I've read and liked Tesarsch before, this book turned out to be interesting reading, with a pertinent take-home message for our time...

Actually, there are two take-home messages: one is that we ought not be complacent about government surveillance in the form of those phone meta-data laws, and the other is that we let significant books lapse from our attention at our peril.

Almost at the end of the novel, the narrator has an airport conversation with a woman who has never heard of the iconic Russian author Solzhenitsyn, and he muses on the fate of his books — books which in the 1970s were required reading at senior secondary schools and tertiary institutions. In my young adulthood, everybody read Solzhenitsyn, and there was even a film of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But now?

You often read, in critical reviews, that certain films or books have not aged well, as though this is an inherent defect of the nature found in cheap consumer goods, in the plastic toys we buy at Christmas for or children, that are never expected to last the year. The same criticism has been levelled at Solzhenitsyn, and in his case, I believe it is unfair. Rather, much of his work is too demanding, if not confronting. (p. 303)

Well, the times have changed, and while during the Cold War education institutions were keen to ensure that the young understood the perils of communism, there isn't the same impetus now since the fall of the Soviet Union. But what Tesarsch is keen to show in his novel, is that while the surveillance methods of the past were clumsy by comparison, digital surveillance in modern states can be equally unfair, and equally damaging to innocent individuals. (Or to those who are not guilty, which is not quite the same thing).

The story travels in two strands. An ambitious young writer called Leonid Krasnov is planted into a circle of dissidents during the Brezhnev era in the USSR. Lured by the promise of having his own work published, Leonid is supposed to pass on information about (and thus prevent the underground publication of) the exposé Solzhenitsyn is writing. (The Gulag Archipelago, which should date the timeframe as 1958-68, because that's when TGA was being written but there is a #NoSpoiler event in the novel which puts the date at 1971). Always plagued by doubt, but unable to extricate himself from the notice of the KGB, Leonid at first complies with what is asked of him, which is not a problem because he can't find out anything more than what is already known by his superiors anyway. But his shaky allegiance wavers when he falls in love with the cellist Klara, whose career has been terminated by her support for the dissident cellist Rostropovich — whose career had likewise been curtailed by the Soviets because of his support for the not-quite-so dissident composer Shostakovich. (Shostakovich has had a good press recently, with sympathetic depictions of his career frustrations in Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time and The Conductor by Sarah Quigley, but in this novel, the composer's ambivalent cooperation with the Soviets is regarded by Leonid as a sellout.)

Woven through this narrative is the second strand, narrated by the same man as an ageing bureaucrat in Canberra. Exiled from the USSR, 'Leo Borsky' migrated under an assumed name to Australia to evade Soviet surveillance in the UK.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/02/24/dinner-with-the-dissidents-by-john-tesarsch/… (plus d'informations)

I found this book quite enjoyable. The story of a family and their reaction to their father's will was all too true to life. The way a death and a will can bring out the best and the worst in people was so true to my experience. The daughter Eleanor was a really interesting character as she wavers between "doing the right thing by her father" and what she really wants to do. The book is set in Victoria in fairly recent times but to me it seemed to be describing English village life of about twenty years ago ( from my experience or reading many books about people in England). The people did not seem to be very Australian to me. Not that this spoiled the book, it is just an observation. Descriptions of the bushfires in Victoria in 2013 did not portray the horror that we read and saw on TV at the time. There are no other reviews unfortunately as I would love to know what other readers thought of it.… (plus d'informations)