For the first time in a long time, I am giving up on a book. I have battled my way through a few tomes I did not enjoy, but this was the one to break my spirits. At the moment of surrender I am over 200 pages in, not even halfway through. A plot is yet to appear in front of me, but I say- screw t...
Someone told me this is a "Marmite book" - and I don't like Marmite. It started promisingly with Catherine's story running parallel to Henry's but then, as they got interesting, they were both hijacked, by Amanda on one side and Sumper on the other, and what had promised so well disappeared into ...
Ever since my high school boyfriend outed me to my youthful music idol as a slavering fangirl, I resolved to be moderate in my attitudes towards artists whose work I admire. Not that I want to downplay my enjoyment of their art, or affect a "too cool for enthusiasm" attitude. But I realized tha...
So - a friend of mine is going to Greece soon and a friend of his collects honey and I tried some and told her it was the nicest honey I had ever tried (which was true - no exaggeration at all). My friend leaves next week and I thought it would be nice to send over a book with him to the honey c...
In 1943 two conservative classicists set out to expose the absurdity of modernist poetry. Both James McAuley and Harold Stewart were classical trained poets, who didn’t think much about modernism; it didn’t rhyme, didn’t make sense and it just didn’t look right, it was fake poetry. If an everyman...
Boy, it's been kind of gloomy around here recently, hasn't it? What with unanticipated abridgments, disorganized Englishmen, and lukewarm responses to historical fiction, things have looked rosier. But here, my friends, is the antidote: Peter Carey's rollicking Australian epic Illywhacker is ro...
As IfMany of the reviews of this fantastic collection of short stories mention the following comment by Peter Carey:"The trouble with academics is that they try too hard to understand these stories .... "They should relax. The stories are only about what they seem to be about. "They are, if you l...
If the varied works of Peter Carey have a unifying thread, it’s his fascination with what it means to be Australian, and Australia’s relationship with the rest of the world. Illywhacker, his second novel, was the first to thoroughly explore this theme, covering three generations of an Australian ...
When Peter Carey offered to take his son to Japan, 12-year-old Charley stipulated no temples or museums. He wanted to see manga, anime, and cool, weird stuff. His father said yes. Out of that bargain comes this enchanting tour of the mansion of Japanese culture, as entered through its garish, bri...
The Rushlight List - A novel for each and every country This was a slow read. Five-hundred pages shouldn't have been too daunting to a regular reader of epic fantasy, but I have to say that after the first few it was clear to me that Oscar and Lucinda was no page-turner. However, I was determined...
I read Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake and Wrong About Japan, and didn’t like either of them. I just couldn’t get hooked into the effusively praised My Life as a Fake, and Wrong About Japan, though it had a few clever insights, seemed too slight to be a book.So I wasn’t planning to read any more ...
Peter Carey captures our imagination with a brilliant and unexpected portrait of Sydney.Bloomsbury is pleased to announce the second title in the phenomenally well-received Writer in the City series-in which some of the world's finest novelists reveal the secrets of the city they know best. In th...
Granny Catchprice runs her family business (and her family) with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives. Her daughter Cathy would rather be singing Country & Western than selling cars, while Benny Catchprice, sixteen and seriously psychopathic, wants to transform a failing auto franc...
Now he stomped out onto that polluted sand at La Per-fucking-rouse and there he removed his Kmart shirt and, with his flesh all a creamy rosy ruin, sat to watch the rusty containers on the distant wharf. Behind, as in an amphitheatre, the dead pressed against us in their serried ranks and I jamme...
I washed and scrubbed my human envelope and shaved three times. As the morning sun illuminated the opposite hillside, I was mentally composing my opening sentences. I wished to incorporate the colours of my native land, the warm pink and ivory and the bright underside of parrot wings. I placed th...
My friend S. went to live in America ten years ago and I still have the letter he wrote me when he first arrived, wherein he describes the shadow factories that were springing up on the west coast and the effects they were having on that society. “You see people in dark glasses wandering around t...
In the end I shall be judged. They will write about me in books and take care to explain me so badly that it is better that I do it myself. They will write with the stupid smugness of middle-class intellectuals, people of moral rectitude who have never seriously placed themselves at risk. They ha...
It is a bullying blustering wind and it blows for all of August and often for October too. In 1984 a westerly wind came down the Parramatta River at 100 miles an hour and lifted the roof off my bedroom on Louisa Road. I was not there to witness the bookshelves fall or the sliding glass doors cras...
You better come for a walk, he said. Dial did not move. Little chat, Trevor insisted, his mouth opening on the left side. The boy watched everything, his throat gone very dry. The mother held up the broken hem, meaning the hundred-dollar bills would fall out if she stood. This money was their lif...
He was a generous man, but very spiteful when crossed, and as she took his empty cup from him she feared she was in danger of being cast out of the house.She was a proud young woman, and extremely particular about who she waited upon and why. Yet when it came to retaining her benefactor’s good op...