Word: novels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fakery is unbecoming to an artist. Indeed, counterfeiting another's creativity is anathema to any honest painter or writer. With his previous novel, Peter Carey took that idea and gave it a macabre twist. In My Life as a Fake, he reimagined Australia's infamous Ern Malley affair - the 1944 literary hoax played by antimodernists Harold Stewart and James McAuley, who posed as a dead working-class poetic "genius" - by bringing a fabricated identity to life to haunt its creator. The novel's sprawling narrative was as gin-soaked and overripe as its Kuala Lumpur setting, but Carey's theme...
...novel, Theft: A Love Story (Knopf; 269 pages), Carey shifts his magpie gaze to an art world overflowing with unscrupulous dealers, avaricious collectors and modernist forgeries, but his question is essentially the same. Ponders has-been Australian artist Michael Boone: "How can you know how much to pay when you have no bloody idea of what it's worth?" As Boone hails from Bacchus Marsh, Carey's birthplace, and finds himself at art's '80s epicenter in Manhattan, where the novelist has lived for nearly two decades, the question of creative worth would seem to resonate strongly with the Booker...
...Theft should sweep Carey's writerly anxieties away. After the chaotic excesses of My Life as a Fake, his new narrative grabs you by the throat and proceeds with a comic urgency not seen since True History of the Kelly Gang. Artist Boone is not dissimilar from that novel's vociferous antihero. But instead of the colonial authorities, he's up against an ex-wife (his unnamed "alimony whore") and an art-world ?lite (including "the idiots at Sotheby's") intent on stripping him of all worldly assets and self-esteem...
...ensuring lively debates involving such literary luminaries as Fathers and Sons author Ivan Turgenev and writer Alexander Gertsen. The writer Nikolai Gogol, whose works reflected Russia's vagaries and antagonisms, was a regular participant. It was here that Gogol first read aloud chapters of his never-to-be-completed novel, Dead Souls...
...DIED. JOHN MCGAHERN, 71, Irish novelist whose early assaults on Ireland's religious and sexual hypocrisy were long shunned at home; in Dublin. After his 1965 novel The Dark was banned and he was forced out of his teaching job, McGahern moved abroad, living in England, France and the U.S. It was only after he resettled in his native Leitrim in the early 1970s that Ireland began to cherish his work, recognizing itself in his quiet portraits of a country riven by the pressures of the modern world...