- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: Vintage (5 Jun 1997)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099757710
- ISBN-13: 978-0099757719
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 1.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 104,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Loaded
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Product Description
Review
`An addictive read... Loaded is a must for your suitcase' --Stylist
`Loaded is a high-octane, drug- and sex-fuelled romp through 24 hours in the life of Ari, a 19-year-old Greek-Australian gay man living on the margins of society. ... there is such a remarkable energy about Ari's narrative in Loaded, and so much self-aware humour and pathos, that it is utterly absorbing, and reminiscent in that respect of such debut novels as Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero or Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. Loaded is a glorious, almighty "fuck you" to Australian society, a primal howl of angst and anguish.'
--The Independent on Sunday
`Loaded is a high-octane, drug- and sex-fuelled romp through 24 hours in the life of Ari, a 19-year-old Greek-Australian gay man living on the margins of society. ... there is such a remarkable energy about Ari's narrative in Loaded, and so much self-aware humour and pathos, that it is utterly absorbing, and reminiscent in that respect of such debut novels as Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero or Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. Loaded is a glorious, almighty "fuck you" to Australian society, a primal howl of angst and anguish.'
--The Independent on Sunday
Book Description
The explosive first novel from the author of The Slap
Inside This Book
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The narrator of `Loaded' is quite a fascinating one. Nineteen year old Ari lives in the city of Melbourne in Australia, he is Greek, he has no job, he is gay but secretly, he loves nothing more than going on massive drink and drug fuelled binges preferably with lots of random anonymous sex along the way. In fact from the first page where the novel opens with Ari masturbating with a massive hangover you pretty much know the story that you are getting here, well you think you do at least, as we follow him for the next twenty four hours.
Initially I didn't think there was really any plot. In fact if I am honest I had written this book as one of those `lets write a really shocking book that gets me published even if it's a cliché but everyone will read it anyway' kind of novels. Yet as we read on between all the drug taking, drinking, etc there is a lot that this book is looking at and saying. One of the main senses you get is a sense of needing to belong, to be a part of something and yet rejecting that very thing at the same time.
Its about fitting in and identity and in the case of Ari he doesn't feel he fits in with the culture (because he is Greek and is Australian yet doesn't feel he can be both) or with his sexuality (he hates the term `gay', only sleeps with `men' not `faggots' and still sleeps with women when he is bored or drugged enough) and these things both add to his sense of feeling like he doesn't belong in his family and that environment. In fact the family dynamic is another thing that Christos Tsiolkas looks at in `Loaded' and this family is pretty dysfunctional. The parent's of Ari, Peter and their sister Alex are volatile to say the least, one minute screaming obscenities at their children, next minute joining them in having a cigarette and an afternoon whiskey or three.
These were the moments when I thought Tsiolkas had the book spot on. We see other friends of Ari's like Joe (very heterosexual) and Johnny (also known as Toula when in drag) and then through Ari's sharing of their back stories get an insight into why they have become addicts, be it to the drink, the drugs or the sex. This was all brilliant and I could have read much, much more should Tsiolkas have written it. Instead sadly we get these marvellous moments of character and prose and then its back to the sex.
I don't have an issue with sex in books; I'm not prudish, if there is a reason behind it. Twice in this book there is, one scene illuminates us to Ari's self image issues and the psychology behind that and what he does to try and rectify it, the other proves a violent then emotional scene between Ari and someone who might just steal his heart. The latter was actually an incredibly effective piece of writing, so much sad in the violence and the silent post-coital cigarette after. Yet when we manage to have about six graphic sex scenes and several solo efforts within 150 pages I was just thinking `do we need this?' It let the rest of the book down rather a lot.
All in all `Loaded' is an interesting book. It is also a book where the effects of the wondrous prose is almost extinguished by the graphic scenes `set to shock' and light up the readers indignation, or whatever effect was meant to be achieved. Take 85% of the sex away and you have a cracking and insightful read into the lives of some mixed up teenagers in the early 90's, and an interesting insight into some of Australia. Sadly with the sex left in some of that is lost, and so sadly was this reader.
Initially I didn't think there was really any plot. In fact if I am honest I had written this book as one of those `lets write a really shocking book that gets me published even if it's a cliché but everyone will read it anyway' kind of novels. Yet as we read on between all the drug taking, drinking, etc there is a lot that this book is looking at and saying. One of the main senses you get is a sense of needing to belong, to be a part of something and yet rejecting that very thing at the same time.
Its about fitting in and identity and in the case of Ari he doesn't feel he fits in with the culture (because he is Greek and is Australian yet doesn't feel he can be both) or with his sexuality (he hates the term `gay', only sleeps with `men' not `faggots' and still sleeps with women when he is bored or drugged enough) and these things both add to his sense of feeling like he doesn't belong in his family and that environment. In fact the family dynamic is another thing that Christos Tsiolkas looks at in `Loaded' and this family is pretty dysfunctional. The parent's of Ari, Peter and their sister Alex are volatile to say the least, one minute screaming obscenities at their children, next minute joining them in having a cigarette and an afternoon whiskey or three.
These were the moments when I thought Tsiolkas had the book spot on. We see other friends of Ari's like Joe (very heterosexual) and Johnny (also known as Toula when in drag) and then through Ari's sharing of their back stories get an insight into why they have become addicts, be it to the drink, the drugs or the sex. This was all brilliant and I could have read much, much more should Tsiolkas have written it. Instead sadly we get these marvellous moments of character and prose and then its back to the sex.
I don't have an issue with sex in books; I'm not prudish, if there is a reason behind it. Twice in this book there is, one scene illuminates us to Ari's self image issues and the psychology behind that and what he does to try and rectify it, the other proves a violent then emotional scene between Ari and someone who might just steal his heart. The latter was actually an incredibly effective piece of writing, so much sad in the violence and the silent post-coital cigarette after. Yet when we manage to have about six graphic sex scenes and several solo efforts within 150 pages I was just thinking `do we need this?' It let the rest of the book down rather a lot.
All in all `Loaded' is an interesting book. It is also a book where the effects of the wondrous prose is almost extinguished by the graphic scenes `set to shock' and light up the readers indignation, or whatever effect was meant to be achieved. Take 85% of the sex away and you have a cracking and insightful read into the lives of some mixed up teenagers in the early 90's, and an interesting insight into some of Australia. Sadly with the sex left in some of that is lost, and so sadly was this reader.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this little book, having read such mixed reviews of Tsiolkas's better-known novel The Slap. But this one - his first, and pretty short at 151 pages - sounded right up my street, so I thought I'd give it a go!
I was actually very pleasantly surprised. It is an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative from the fascinating mind of Ari, a nineteen year-old gay Greek boy living in Melbourne. Ari is simultaneously an aggressively confident young man, and completely conflicted about everything, veering between vehement certainty and utter helplessness. He isn't entirely at ease with his sexuality, his friends come and go around him, he despises the confinement of traditional Greek life, and he has absolutely no sense of where he's going - despite his occasional protestations to the contrary. All he really knows is that he loves movies and music, sex and drugs, and that being loaded keeps him calm, quiet and ALMOST content. The novel drags the reader along for a 24-hour ride inside his head as he snorts, shags, drinks and meanders his way through another day.
A few times as I was reading I found myself thinking, "Wow, THIS is what I wanted when I read The Catcher in the Rye!" I didn't identify with Salinger's whiny Holden Caulfield at all, but I rather liked Ari. His voice is angry, passionate, intelligent and provocative, and even when I didn't agree with him I couldn't help but feel a admiring respect for his brutal arguments and perceptive observations. I think as a character, he is so interesting because he can so readily see the beauty of other people and places and situations, yet seems to be incapable of translating that beauty into his own life and future. I really felt for him!
Despite all this, I didn't give LOADED a higher rating, because although I was completely absorbed in Ari's world, it was quite slow going (perhaps surprisingly, given that Ari is sky high for half of it) and I don't think it will ultimately be a particularly memorable read. There were one or two moments that really made me cringe, particularly the scenes in various clubs around Melbourne which invariably contain awful descriptions of dancing - frequent mentions of 'jumping around', and what moves Ari's 'working in' from his dance repertoire. I found these parts incredibly jarring - though perhaps Tsiolkas intended them to be that way, to reflect the way Ari's drugged mind made some unnaturally slow and conscious decisions about even the most mundane of things? Who knows - all I know is, I didn't like it much.
At any rate, Ari was a wonderful guide to the seedier underbelly of Melbourne life - the dark alleys for fumbling liaisons, the tangled, insular existence of the many different ethnicities on the outskirts of 'skip' society - and I liked the novel enough to give The Slap a try at some point. I also ordered the screen adaptation, Head On - Special Edition [2000] [DVD], which I'm rather looking forward to. Recommended for those who don't mind their literature buzzing, explicit and occasionally a little uncomfortable, even as it forces them to stop and think about the world from a new perspective.
I was actually very pleasantly surprised. It is an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative from the fascinating mind of Ari, a nineteen year-old gay Greek boy living in Melbourne. Ari is simultaneously an aggressively confident young man, and completely conflicted about everything, veering between vehement certainty and utter helplessness. He isn't entirely at ease with his sexuality, his friends come and go around him, he despises the confinement of traditional Greek life, and he has absolutely no sense of where he's going - despite his occasional protestations to the contrary. All he really knows is that he loves movies and music, sex and drugs, and that being loaded keeps him calm, quiet and ALMOST content. The novel drags the reader along for a 24-hour ride inside his head as he snorts, shags, drinks and meanders his way through another day.
A few times as I was reading I found myself thinking, "Wow, THIS is what I wanted when I read The Catcher in the Rye!" I didn't identify with Salinger's whiny Holden Caulfield at all, but I rather liked Ari. His voice is angry, passionate, intelligent and provocative, and even when I didn't agree with him I couldn't help but feel a admiring respect for his brutal arguments and perceptive observations. I think as a character, he is so interesting because he can so readily see the beauty of other people and places and situations, yet seems to be incapable of translating that beauty into his own life and future. I really felt for him!
Despite all this, I didn't give LOADED a higher rating, because although I was completely absorbed in Ari's world, it was quite slow going (perhaps surprisingly, given that Ari is sky high for half of it) and I don't think it will ultimately be a particularly memorable read. There were one or two moments that really made me cringe, particularly the scenes in various clubs around Melbourne which invariably contain awful descriptions of dancing - frequent mentions of 'jumping around', and what moves Ari's 'working in' from his dance repertoire. I found these parts incredibly jarring - though perhaps Tsiolkas intended them to be that way, to reflect the way Ari's drugged mind made some unnaturally slow and conscious decisions about even the most mundane of things? Who knows - all I know is, I didn't like it much.
At any rate, Ari was a wonderful guide to the seedier underbelly of Melbourne life - the dark alleys for fumbling liaisons, the tangled, insular existence of the many different ethnicities on the outskirts of 'skip' society - and I liked the novel enough to give The Slap a try at some point. I also ordered the screen adaptation, Head On - Special Edition [2000] [DVD], which I'm rather looking forward to. Recommended for those who don't mind their literature buzzing, explicit and occasionally a little uncomfortable, even as it forces them to stop and think about the world from a new perspective.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The first time I heard of this book was when the film was released. Luckily I read it before I went to see the movie. The movie was OK but lacked the intensity and subtlety of the novel. Finally a gay story that's totally different from most of the standard gay fluff. You immediately get sucked into the story only to surface at the end. Amazing!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Even better than the film...
I saw the film "Head On" half a year ago and just thought Pwoarr! Well lucky me I found the book on sale here in tiny Copenhagen. And I read it in one go. Read more
Published on 23 Mar 2000
It doesen't hurt!?!
Take Catcher in the Rye, remove the innocence and the excellence, mix with liberal quantities of speed, ecstacy and anonymous gay sex simmer in an Australian pan for an hour,... Read more
Published on 20 Aug 1999
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