Word: careys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ARTS Books: Peter Carey's new novel...
Australian novelist Peter Carey frequently finds inspiration in his country's rich social history. In True History of the Kelly Gang, he chronicled the exploits of the bushranger Ned Kelly. In Jack Maggs, he penned a brilliant fantasia about an Aussie convict crossing paths with Charles Dickens. Carey's new novel, My Life as a Fake, is an absorbing, mind-bending tale incorporating another odd corner of Australian history: one of the nation's most bizarre literary scandals, the Ern Malley hoax...
...Carey quotes original documents from the scandal extensively but updates the action to the early '70s and transports a now lone hoaxer, Christopher Chubb, to Kuala Lumpur. The book's narrator (and Chubb's hoaxee) is Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a highbrow literary review based in London. When Chubb shows her a single page of verse written by Bob McCorkle (the novel's Ern Malley), Wode-Douglass becomes obsessed with publishing work bearing his name. The mainspring of Carey's story is a fascinating statement by Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins, years after the original hoax was exposed...
...This tale of a monster emerging from the human mind and the international pursuit of a crumbling manuscript closely follows the canons of the 19th century Gothic novel. Yet Carey does right not to belabor his debt to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which haunts every page. Carey unfolds his plot in a Chinese-box construction of narration within narration, focusing mostly on Chubb's telling his story to Wode-Douglass in a hotel bar in K.L. It's a convention straight out of a Regency-era chiller: the aged friar revealing the horrid skeletons in the abbey closet...
...LIFE AS A FAKE By Peter Carey What happens when a poet decides to teach everyone else a lesson about reality and fakery? It's his life, not theirs, that is changed. Inspired by a legendary literary hoax in Australia, the Booker winner's new novel delves satisfyingly into a world of lies, literary demons and artistic pretense...