"Presumably the tragic
part of the book's title is easy to discern, and it is tragic,
but -- and looking back over the summary above, I know it must
seem hard to believe -- it's also very funny, albeit in a sardonic
vein. A sort of love gone wrong Seinfeld ten years in the future,
where the zip and flash of youth is gone and all that remains
are the neuroses, the ritualised relationships and a very clear
view of the no-longer-quite-so-long march to the grave.
"The book itself employs an ingenious and quite daring structure.
"The Weekly Card Game is a deceptive book. Within its simple premise lies a deeply layered felt story that plays like a coda for lost youth. It is a lament for time passing, a testament to the depth of passion, of love, even of feeling, yet within its vast ennui it is a rich and beautiful book written with great compassion and intelligence. It is a sophisticated, witty, and, perhaps unusually for an Australian novel, deeply urbane book."
James Bradley, ArielView, 1995
"This could be one of the novels of the year... That's the trouble with this book -- it could be a hairy goat, and some readers will think it is, but I'm willing to put my reviewer's fee on it coming home with a major prize this year.
"It sounds like the end of Rasselas, and in fact the tone of Dr. Johnson's fable seems to echo through the novel. That is part of its charm. The narrative style is that of the fabulist... Using such techniques foregrounds the method of storytelling, which you can praise for being up to the minute (post-modern) or very traditional (Arabian Nights). Whatever, Jach does it beautifully...
"Read it as an amusingly satirical fable of our current obsessions and how we can grow out of them. If you do so, this novel will win a prize hands down."
Julian Croft, The Australian, Feb 11-12, 1995
" The Weekly Card Game is quite
remarkable in contemporary Australian writing. I think there's
nothing like it that has been published in the last twenty years
or so.
"There's one possible exception which is some of Murray Bail's work which is detached and dispassionate and yet full of a sense of absurdity and a baroque sense of the entrapments of the Australian consciousness."
Helen Daniel, Books and Writing, ABC Radio National, 1994
"The Weekly Card Game is like a
medieval dance in which the characters move slowly and deliberately
around a confined, self-defined space...
"Jach writes his story as though
he is writing music. The story has a physical rhythm. A mesmerising
repetition of words and key phrases reinforces the central theme
of routine. Chapters move sequentially through changes which
occur over years, structuring them along the way.
"If this is a musical composition,
it is a carefully constructed set of variations... the work of
a skilled composer."
Miriam Cosic, The Sydney Morning Herald, November 26, 1994
"It could all prove a fairly depressing
mirror, really, and let's face it, you have to be a reasonably
assured writer to embark upon a novel with boredom as its major
theme. Jach executes his ambition beautifully, analysing the patterns
and structures that enmesh and sustain the five central characters
with Foucauldian precision and entertaining us with his wry and
measured prose.
"It is a rare pleasure to find such
honed and elegant writing... Somehow, The Weekly Card Game manages
to achieve what so few Australian novels do, to explore a Beckett-like
theme that nags at us all from time to time, via the minutiae
that constitutes what we dare to call living. It's enough to make
you want to give up Pizza Night altogether."
Tina Muncaster, Australian Book Review, November 1994
"The flavour is particularly Melbourne: precise, witty, internalised. Antoni Jach has learnt something of Sydney-sider Frank Moorhouse's social playfulness and needle-sharp observation. A compulsive read, even though it is all about the horror that hides within habit."
Tom Shapcott, in a section entitled 'The Year's Best Books
1994,
The Age (Melb.) 17 December, 1994
"It can't be that easy to write
a book about a group of people frittering away their lives in
a series of meaningless social rituals and make it wonderfully
entertaining from start to finish, but Antoni Jach has managed
to do just this in his debut novel.
"The story spreads out from the
still centre of the card table, describing an intricate web of
friends, family, work mates and odd associates. All hedging their
bets against the changes that must (and do) eventually come. This
book is an unexpected treasure with a wonderful, sly wit. Buy
it now."
Richard Mudford,
The Melbourne Times, 23 November
1994
"These groups represent the tyranny of social ritual, and the irony of intelligent people being constrained by a search for greater freedom. The thesis has an impressive literary pedigree, but whereas Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy might have worked the ideas through character and drama, Antoni Jach writes with the deadpan deliberation of a poker player clinically sure of his hand: flat, straight and icy cool."
Ian McFarlane, Canberra Times, 6 Nov. 1994
"What I find especially memorable is the double-edged position:
it's set on the edge of the consolation and comfort of social
rituals and the confinements that accompany such rituals."
"It did strike me that there is very much a (Murray) Bail tone to The Weekly Card Game - one that I certainly enjoyed very much. I am still struck by how different your novel is from most of the novels being published.
"Certainly it's not a conventional
novel in the sense of plot and narrative and vigorous action leaping
off the page at the reader. I think it's a remarkable exploration
of the kind of ennui and lassitude that can set in peoples' lives
when they are trapped in certain weekly routines and at the same
time it's about fear. It seems to me in part to be about the fear
that there is nothing other than the routines, other than the
schematic structure within which we sort of puddle."
Helen Daniel, Books and Writing, ABC Radio National, 1994
"Very wise and very funny, this is a beautiful, elegiac book to be compared with the great Melbourne books such as My Brother Jack."
Simon Hughes, Storm, February 1995
"His literary urbanity seems at one with a readiness to experiment, evidenced by Jach's indifference to plot and relentless use of a third-person narration throughout.
"This sounds pretty grim, but grimness is not the main or final impression. True, it is a sad book. But also very funny. The characters are drawn so sympathetically, and with such warmth and humour, that it is neither bleak nor depressing.
"In one sense, nothing much happens in the book. In another, everything does: because the interest lies in the telling, rather than the tale, with shifts in the narrative and consequences of the characters being the sort of people they are... This is bittersweet comic writing of some accomplishment."
John Jenkins, Overland, no. 139 1995