Antidote to a Curse review: James Cristina's multi-layered coming of age story

Antidote to a Curse

James Cristina

Transit Lounge, $29.99

This first novel from James Cristina opens like a Chinese box, the treasures inside transporting us back to Melbourne in the 1990s. We follow Silvio Portelli, a young gay man who's obsessively worried about the impending results of an HIV test. That anxiety hovers like a wasp over Silvio, as the aspiring writer drifts through job interviews he doesn't want, while living with an ebullient octogenarian, Nancy, who has constructed a huge aviary to accommodate her love of birds and cats. Then there's Zlatko, a Bosnian refugee he meets at a sex shop, through whom both sexual awakening, and atrocities half a world away, zoom into focus. There are shades of Christos Tsiolkas' Loaded in this multi-layered coming of age story about identity that twines Silvio's agonies and desires, his struggle to find his place, with a metafictional strand that reflects on the making of a writer.