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Ο Πλαστογράφος
Ο Πίτερ Κάρεϊ, ο Αυστραλός συγγραφέας που έχει βραβευθεί δύο φορές με το βραβείο Booker, δημιουργεί σ' αυτό το βιβλίο ένα πλάσμα εξίσου μοναδικό με τον Φρανκεστάιν.
Δεκαετία του '40, Μελβούρνη: ένας νεαρός συντηρητικός ποιητής, ο Κρίστοφερ Τσαμπ, αποφασίζει να δώσει ένα μάθημα στην πατρίδα του για την αλήθεια και το ψέμα. Βάζει στόχο το πιο πρωτοποριακό λογοτεχνικό περιοδικό στο οποίο υποβάλλει για δημοσίευση τα άπαντα κάποιου Μπομπ Μακόρκλ, ποιητή, που προέρχεται από εργατική οικογένεια και του οποίου τα γραπτά ξεχωρίζουν για την άγρια δύναμη και τη σεξουαλική τους ελευθεριότητα. Υποτίθεται ότι ο τύπος που γεννάει η φαντασία του Κρίστοφερ Τσαμπ πέθανε είκοσι τεσσάρων χρόνων. Ο εκδότης του περιοδικού εξαπατάται από την πλαστογραφία και μάλιστα οι τοπικές αρχές του κάνουν αγωγή επειδή δημοσίευσε άσεμνο υλικό. Στη δίκη που επακολουθεί, κάποιος τύπος που μοιάζει τρομερά στην πλαστογραφημένη φωτογραφία του επινοημένου Μακόρκλ εξεγείρεται. Έντρομος ο Τσαμπ βρίσκεται ξαφνικά αντιμέτωπος με το μοχθηρό πλάσμα που κατασκεύασε ο ίδιος.
Μια μανιακή, γοητευτική και διεισδυτική ωδή όπου η πλαστογραφία φτάνει στο απόγειο της αληθοφάνειας και η αλήθεια στο απόγειο της πλασματικότητας. Ένα μυθιστόρημα που αγγίζει το κέντρο της λογοτεχνικής αλχημείας.
Δεκαετία του '40, Μελβούρνη: ένας νεαρός συντηρητικός ποιητής, ο Κρίστοφερ Τσαμπ, αποφασίζει να δώσει ένα μάθημα στην πατρίδα του για την αλήθεια και το ψέμα. Βάζει στόχο το πιο πρωτοποριακό λογοτεχνικό περιοδικό στο οποίο υποβάλλει για δημοσίευση τα άπαντα κάποιου Μπομπ Μακόρκλ, ποιητή, που προέρχεται από εργατική οικογένεια και του οποίου τα γραπτά ξεχωρίζουν για την άγρια δύναμη και τη σεξουαλική τους ελευθεριότητα. Υποτίθεται ότι ο τύπος που γεννάει η φαντασία του Κρίστοφερ Τσαμπ πέθανε είκοσι τεσσάρων χρόνων. Ο εκδότης του περιοδικού εξαπατάται από την πλαστογραφία και μάλιστα οι τοπικές αρχές του κάνουν αγωγή επειδή δημοσίευσε άσεμνο υλικό. Στη δίκη που επακολουθεί, κάποιος τύπος που μοιάζει τρομερά στην πλαστογραφημένη φωτογραφία του επινοημένου Μακόρκλ εξεγείρεται. Έντρομος ο Τσαμπ βρίσκεται ξαφνικά αντιμέτωπος με το μοχθηρό πλάσμα που κατασκεύασε ο ίδιος.
Μια μανιακή, γοητευτική και διεισδυτική ωδή όπου η πλαστογραφία φτάνει στο απόγειο της αληθοφάνειας και η αλήθεια στο απόγειο της πλασματικότητας. Ένα μυθιστόρημα που αγγίζει το κέντρο της λογοτεχνικής αλχημείας.
327 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
86 people are currently reading
1842 people want to read
About the author
Peter Carey
102 books1,033 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Not all books on this profile are by the same author. See this thread for more information.
Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943.
He was educated at the local state school until the age of eleven and then became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School. He was a student there between 1954 and 1960 — after Rupert Murdoch had graduated and before Prince Charles arrived.
In 1961 he studied science for a single unsuccessful year at Monash University. He was then employed by an advertising agency where he began to receive his literary education, meeting Faulkner, Joyce, Kerouac and other writers he had previously been unaware of. He was nineteen.
For the next thirteen years he wrote fiction at night and weekends, working in many advertising agencies in Melbourne, London and Sydney.
After four novels had been written and rejected The Fat Man in History — a short story collection — was published in 1974. This slim book made him an overnight success.
From 1976 Carey worked one week a month for Grey Advertising, then, in 1981 he established a small business where his generous partner required him to work only two afternoons a week. Thus between 1976 and 1990, he was able to pursue literature obsessively. It was during this period that he wrote War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda. Illywhacker was short listed for the Booker Prize. Oscar and Lucinda won it. Uncomfortable with this success he began work on The Tax Inspector.
In 1990 he moved to New York where he completed The Tax Inspector. He taught at NYU one night a week. Later he would have similar jobs at Princeton, The New School and Barnard College. During these years he wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, and True History of the Kelly Gang for which he won his second Booker Prize.
He collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders.
In 2003 he joined Hunter College as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In the years since he has written My Life as a Fake, Theft, His Illegal Self and Parrot and Oliver in America (shortlisted for 2010 Man Booker Prize).
Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943.
He was educated at the local state school until the age of eleven and then became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School. He was a student there between 1954 and 1960 — after Rupert Murdoch had graduated and before Prince Charles arrived.
In 1961 he studied science for a single unsuccessful year at Monash University. He was then employed by an advertising agency where he began to receive his literary education, meeting Faulkner, Joyce, Kerouac and other writers he had previously been unaware of. He was nineteen.
For the next thirteen years he wrote fiction at night and weekends, working in many advertising agencies in Melbourne, London and Sydney.
After four novels had been written and rejected The Fat Man in History — a short story collection — was published in 1974. This slim book made him an overnight success.
From 1976 Carey worked one week a month for Grey Advertising, then, in 1981 he established a small business where his generous partner required him to work only two afternoons a week. Thus between 1976 and 1990, he was able to pursue literature obsessively. It was during this period that he wrote War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda. Illywhacker was short listed for the Booker Prize. Oscar and Lucinda won it. Uncomfortable with this success he began work on The Tax Inspector.
In 1990 he moved to New York where he completed The Tax Inspector. He taught at NYU one night a week. Later he would have similar jobs at Princeton, The New School and Barnard College. During these years he wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, and True History of the Kelly Gang for which he won his second Booker Prize.
He collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders.
In 2003 he joined Hunter College as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In the years since he has written My Life as a Fake, Theft, His Illegal Self and Parrot and Oliver in America (shortlisted for 2010 Man Booker Prize).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 382 reviews
December 5, 2023
Do you live your own life? Or do you try to imitate the others?
And if you’re trying to imitate a fictional personage will you become one? Will you end up as an ultimate hoax?
Peter Carey is once again full of originality. And ‘hoax’ is a keyword of My Life as a Fake…
And who can tell where does reality end and imagination begin?
And who can tell where does individuality end and imitation begin?
Fashion is always a call to imitate… Political slogan is always an invitation to become a part of a herd…
And if you’re trying to imitate a fictional personage will you become one? Will you end up as an ultimate hoax?
Peter Carey is once again full of originality. And ‘hoax’ is a keyword of My Life as a Fake…
He is right, he said quietly. The hoax misfired. I wished to make a point, but only to a few. Who cares about poetry? Fifty people in Australia? Ten with minds you might respect. Once Weiss had declared my fake was a work of genius, I wished those ten people to know. That was it, Mem. I never wanted the tabloids. Who would expect the Melbourne Argus would ever be interested in poetry. This was not their business, but what a caning-lah, what a public lashing poor old Weiss was given. I could never have foreseen that.
And who can tell where does reality end and imagination begin?
I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters –
Not knowing then that Durer perceived it too.
And who can tell where does individuality end and imitation begin?
Fashion is always a call to imitate… Political slogan is always an invitation to become a part of a herd…
April 23, 2024
Second reading
A thriller. The novel's structure is of the Chinese box sort, in which story is nested within story. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has such a structure and is also, funnily enough, alluded to here.
Here's John Updike's review from The New Yorker.
November 16, 2003
Peter Carey’s new novel, “My Life as a Fake” (Knopf; $24), is so confidently brilliant, so economical yet lively in its writing, so tightly fitted and continuously startling in its plot that something, we feel, must be wrong with it. It ends in a bit of a rush, and left several questions dangling in this reader’s mind. Unfortunately, to spell out those questions would be to betray too much of an intricate fictional construct where little is as it first seems and fantastic developments unfold like scenes on a fragile paper fan. To be brief: the narrator and heroine is Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass, the spinster editor of the London avant-garde journal The Modern Review, who in August of 1985 sits down in Berkshire to recount an adventure that befell her thirteen years before, in Malaysia, when an old friend of her family’s, the poet and novelist John Slater, twenty years her senior, persuaded her to accompany him to Kuala Lumpur for a week. Thus, she writes, she “entered that maze from which, thirteen years later, I have yet to escape.”
At the center of the maze lies an old Australian literary scandal, the so-called McCorkle Hoax, in which, in 1946, an obscure and, because obscure, bitter poet named Christopher Chubb passed off parodic verses of his own as the work of an authentic poet-of-the-people, the imaginary Bob McCorkle. McCorkle is supposedly dead, and his mighty works have been timidly brought forward by his unsophisticated sister. The rough-hewn opus was accepted and published with fanfare by the avant-garde journal Personae, whose editor was a rich Jew who had befriended Chubb, one David Weiss. When Weiss, on the strength of one punning line, was prosecuted for obscenity, Chubb exposed the hoax, humiliating him further; in mid-trial, Weiss died violently, apparently a suicide. Readers up on Australian artistic pranks—born, Slater theorizes, of antipodean cultural insecurity—will recognize the lineaments of the real-life Ern Malley affair, which was perpetrated in 1944, by two skillful anti-modernists, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, victimizing a Melbourne magazine called, believe it or not, Angry Penguins. The editor-victim was Max Harris, who did not die of the hoax but lived to write, in a recollection years later, “I still believe in Ern Malley. . . . I can still close my eyes and conjure up such a person in our streets.” Carey quotes this article of strange faith in an afterword, and it, taken with the epigraph from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” perhaps gives a sufficient hint of the novel’s animating premise: Bob McCorkle lives.
A native Australian who has been resident for thirteen years in New York City, Carey has used the distance to contemplate and reshape some notable legends of his homeland: his previous novel, the epic, Booker Prize-winning “True History of the Kelly Gang” (2000), retells the tale of Australia’s most famous outlaw, Ned Kelly, in the hero’s touchingly and comically ingenuous voice. The novel before that, “Jack Maggs” (1997), takes an Australian element from Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” the transported convict Magwitch, and enlarges him into an epitome of adopted Australian nationhood. The Australian connection is understandably Carey’s lifeblood, but his inspirations depend, in these three instances, on other texts. He imposes personality upon paper rather than deriving, as novelists more customarily do, a paper work from personal sources. Novels of his that draw directly upon Australian reality, like “Bliss” (1981) and “Oscar and Lucinda” (1988), have a hectic fullness and a fond cruelty reminiscent of Dawn Powell’s novels of her native Ohio. Such brimming, jostling fullness thins a bit as Carey ventures, however nimbly, into the small continent’s historic past. “My Life as a Fake” does more than take its start from a historical literary hoax; its central theme and its dominant metaphor are paper, amid the papery passions of the writers and editors who are its principal characters.
“The tropics are not kind to paper,” Christopher Chubb observes, as the ulcerations of Malaysia eat away at his legs. His lowly position of bike repairer on a “noisy street of Chinese shophouses with the unlikely name of Jalan Campbell” has been achieved at the end of a long chain of heated events having to do with printed words. In a dirty sarong and with close-cropped hair, he makes our narrator think, in her first glance, “of both a prisoner and a monk.” But, like him, Sarah is obsessed by literary greatness; neither money nor love much matters to her. John Slater has stooped to pursue both, and she rather despises him for it; he strikes her in his worldliness as “a large and meaty man.” When Chubb calls her on the telephone, he has “a strange, papery voice,” and she will end, despite Slater’s emphatic advice to the contrary, by listening to that siren voice on and on, transcribing Chubb’s tangled tale as he tells it. Chubb is easier to listen to than to conjure as a physical presence: the corners of his lips are shadowy, and his eyelids and his hands are both “papery.” Even his one suit, old and dirty, comes back from the cleaners paperized: “The process of cleaning had so shocked the fabric that it was now broken on the creases, papery and crumbling in his hand like the wing of a dead butterfly.”
And yet books, at least the sacred volume of McCorkle’s poetry, have an unexpectedly various, organic quality: “It was much heavier than I had expected, and very strange to touch—a peculiar texture, slightly oily in places, scaly in others.” When this book is at last opened and read by our heroine, its contents are visceral: “Whoever he was or had been, Bob McCorkle was indeed a genius. He had ripped up history and nailed it back together with its viscera on the outside, all that glistening green truth showing in the rip marks.” The work puts her in mind of Ezra Pound, the ineffable, unfathomable Pound of the Cantos. She triumphantly claims, “This was worth being born for, this single giddy glimpse, on this high place, with the sound of my own blood singing in my ears.” A book is not just paper but humanity, flesh and blood, as Chubb finds when he comes to nurse the dying master poet: “To be so intimate with Bob McCorkle was disgusting, as unnatural and frightening as holding one’s own vital organs in one’s hands.”
Along with Pound, Milton, and the fictive Ern Malley, Joseph Conrad haunts “My Life as a Fake.” Teeming, torrid Malaysia is “Lord Jim or even worse,” and Chubb, who talks “all day and almost half the night,” resembles Conrad’s dreamily long-winded narrator Marlow. Narratives within narratives uncoil as Malaysia ousts English-language literature at the emotional center of the book. Chubb makes a new friend, the dark, wall-eyed Tamil Kanagaratnam Chomley, called Mulaha, who teaches school and makes a hobby of poisoning. Mulaha’s tale of slaughter and vengeance under the Japanese occupation takes us far afield from the theme of literary fakery and from the pursuit of the white whale McCorkle, who has kidnapped what seems to be Chubb’s infant daughter, sprung from a resourceful, shape-shifting beauty called, when Chubb first meets her, Noussette Markson. (Down, plot!) And, indeed, now that the European colonization of Southeast Asia is a bittersweet memory, preserved in the words of Conrad and Orwell and Graham Greene, who will mediate this vast region for the Western imagination but the Australians? They seize it as their nearest escape from insularity, a vacationland and possible sphere of influence.
Carey’s prose is up to any task he sets it. His novel has many voices: Sarah’s taut blithe fluency, that of an upper-class intellectual; Slater’s bluff, irresistibly British effrontery; Chubb’s defensive meander punctuated with Australian and Malay expressions; Mulaha’s elaborate courtesies; a Chinese-Malaysian woman’s aggressively fractured English—all without benefit of quotation marks. Usually I simply resent deprivation of these helpful, clarifying indicators, but Carey (who didn’t use them in “True History of the Kelly Gang,” either) almost persuades me that human speech, thus unified with the narrative sentences, acquires a certain stateliness, as in the Bible. McCorkle, like the also heroic Ned Kelly, speaks in the near-Biblical accents of a common man whose dignity has been offended:
"I continued strolling until I found a café run by a little reffo fellow in a dirty singlet. I got him to make me a chicken-and-lettuce sandwich and a chocolate malted milk. At dusk I returned to Birdsing’s residence. . . . From the middle of his iris beds I could clearly see the accused through his window. He had a bottle of Victoria Bitter and a meat pie for his dinner. I also live alone and know what it is to spend these hours of solitude when I would rather have a wife and baby and the smell of stew bubbling in the pot. But what civilised person can sit down to a meal like this and not pick up a book to read?"
Even Sarah, confessing to lesbianism, warms into an innocent lilt: “I shocked her often but delighted her all the more, and there was no part of her that was secret to me.” Chubb, though demoralized by his experience of the word made flesh, brings the odd detail sharply to life:
[Mulaha] was very fierce, very definite, like someone accustomed to giving orders, also like a small bird with fixed ideas. He took out a pen and rapped McCorkle’s nose with it.
Carey’s own voice sounds in an arrestingly apt simile: “McCorkle quickly made a bamboo frame on which to lash the naked, mud-caked woman. She was a tiny thing but dense as a bulldog.”
Other reviewers of this folded and refolded tale of mental and physical adventure have claimed its moral to be that everyone depicted is a fake. I don’t see this; the characters are as genuine as their words permit them to be, though all, being characters, are caught up in the business of fiction, which is fakery. ♦︎
First reading
An exceptional novel from Peter Carey. It may even be better than the brilliant True History of the Kelly Gang. I can not recommend it too highly. A dazzler.
A thriller. The novel's structure is of the Chinese box sort, in which story is nested within story. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has such a structure and is also, funnily enough, alluded to here.
Here's John Updike's review from The New Yorker.
November 16, 2003
Peter Carey’s new novel, “My Life as a Fake” (Knopf; $24), is so confidently brilliant, so economical yet lively in its writing, so tightly fitted and continuously startling in its plot that something, we feel, must be wrong with it. It ends in a bit of a rush, and left several questions dangling in this reader’s mind. Unfortunately, to spell out those questions would be to betray too much of an intricate fictional construct where little is as it first seems and fantastic developments unfold like scenes on a fragile paper fan. To be brief: the narrator and heroine is Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass, the spinster editor of the London avant-garde journal The Modern Review, who in August of 1985 sits down in Berkshire to recount an adventure that befell her thirteen years before, in Malaysia, when an old friend of her family’s, the poet and novelist John Slater, twenty years her senior, persuaded her to accompany him to Kuala Lumpur for a week. Thus, she writes, she “entered that maze from which, thirteen years later, I have yet to escape.”
At the center of the maze lies an old Australian literary scandal, the so-called McCorkle Hoax, in which, in 1946, an obscure and, because obscure, bitter poet named Christopher Chubb passed off parodic verses of his own as the work of an authentic poet-of-the-people, the imaginary Bob McCorkle. McCorkle is supposedly dead, and his mighty works have been timidly brought forward by his unsophisticated sister. The rough-hewn opus was accepted and published with fanfare by the avant-garde journal Personae, whose editor was a rich Jew who had befriended Chubb, one David Weiss. When Weiss, on the strength of one punning line, was prosecuted for obscenity, Chubb exposed the hoax, humiliating him further; in mid-trial, Weiss died violently, apparently a suicide. Readers up on Australian artistic pranks—born, Slater theorizes, of antipodean cultural insecurity—will recognize the lineaments of the real-life Ern Malley affair, which was perpetrated in 1944, by two skillful anti-modernists, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, victimizing a Melbourne magazine called, believe it or not, Angry Penguins. The editor-victim was Max Harris, who did not die of the hoax but lived to write, in a recollection years later, “I still believe in Ern Malley. . . . I can still close my eyes and conjure up such a person in our streets.” Carey quotes this article of strange faith in an afterword, and it, taken with the epigraph from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” perhaps gives a sufficient hint of the novel’s animating premise: Bob McCorkle lives.
A native Australian who has been resident for thirteen years in New York City, Carey has used the distance to contemplate and reshape some notable legends of his homeland: his previous novel, the epic, Booker Prize-winning “True History of the Kelly Gang” (2000), retells the tale of Australia’s most famous outlaw, Ned Kelly, in the hero’s touchingly and comically ingenuous voice. The novel before that, “Jack Maggs” (1997), takes an Australian element from Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” the transported convict Magwitch, and enlarges him into an epitome of adopted Australian nationhood. The Australian connection is understandably Carey’s lifeblood, but his inspirations depend, in these three instances, on other texts. He imposes personality upon paper rather than deriving, as novelists more customarily do, a paper work from personal sources. Novels of his that draw directly upon Australian reality, like “Bliss” (1981) and “Oscar and Lucinda” (1988), have a hectic fullness and a fond cruelty reminiscent of Dawn Powell’s novels of her native Ohio. Such brimming, jostling fullness thins a bit as Carey ventures, however nimbly, into the small continent’s historic past. “My Life as a Fake” does more than take its start from a historical literary hoax; its central theme and its dominant metaphor are paper, amid the papery passions of the writers and editors who are its principal characters.
“The tropics are not kind to paper,” Christopher Chubb observes, as the ulcerations of Malaysia eat away at his legs. His lowly position of bike repairer on a “noisy street of Chinese shophouses with the unlikely name of Jalan Campbell” has been achieved at the end of a long chain of heated events having to do with printed words. In a dirty sarong and with close-cropped hair, he makes our narrator think, in her first glance, “of both a prisoner and a monk.” But, like him, Sarah is obsessed by literary greatness; neither money nor love much matters to her. John Slater has stooped to pursue both, and she rather despises him for it; he strikes her in his worldliness as “a large and meaty man.” When Chubb calls her on the telephone, he has “a strange, papery voice,” and she will end, despite Slater’s emphatic advice to the contrary, by listening to that siren voice on and on, transcribing Chubb’s tangled tale as he tells it. Chubb is easier to listen to than to conjure as a physical presence: the corners of his lips are shadowy, and his eyelids and his hands are both “papery.” Even his one suit, old and dirty, comes back from the cleaners paperized: “The process of cleaning had so shocked the fabric that it was now broken on the creases, papery and crumbling in his hand like the wing of a dead butterfly.”
And yet books, at least the sacred volume of McCorkle’s poetry, have an unexpectedly various, organic quality: “It was much heavier than I had expected, and very strange to touch—a peculiar texture, slightly oily in places, scaly in others.” When this book is at last opened and read by our heroine, its contents are visceral: “Whoever he was or had been, Bob McCorkle was indeed a genius. He had ripped up history and nailed it back together with its viscera on the outside, all that glistening green truth showing in the rip marks.” The work puts her in mind of Ezra Pound, the ineffable, unfathomable Pound of the Cantos. She triumphantly claims, “This was worth being born for, this single giddy glimpse, on this high place, with the sound of my own blood singing in my ears.” A book is not just paper but humanity, flesh and blood, as Chubb finds when he comes to nurse the dying master poet: “To be so intimate with Bob McCorkle was disgusting, as unnatural and frightening as holding one’s own vital organs in one’s hands.”
Along with Pound, Milton, and the fictive Ern Malley, Joseph Conrad haunts “My Life as a Fake.” Teeming, torrid Malaysia is “Lord Jim or even worse,” and Chubb, who talks “all day and almost half the night,” resembles Conrad’s dreamily long-winded narrator Marlow. Narratives within narratives uncoil as Malaysia ousts English-language literature at the emotional center of the book. Chubb makes a new friend, the dark, wall-eyed Tamil Kanagaratnam Chomley, called Mulaha, who teaches school and makes a hobby of poisoning. Mulaha’s tale of slaughter and vengeance under the Japanese occupation takes us far afield from the theme of literary fakery and from the pursuit of the white whale McCorkle, who has kidnapped what seems to be Chubb’s infant daughter, sprung from a resourceful, shape-shifting beauty called, when Chubb first meets her, Noussette Markson. (Down, plot!) And, indeed, now that the European colonization of Southeast Asia is a bittersweet memory, preserved in the words of Conrad and Orwell and Graham Greene, who will mediate this vast region for the Western imagination but the Australians? They seize it as their nearest escape from insularity, a vacationland and possible sphere of influence.
Carey’s prose is up to any task he sets it. His novel has many voices: Sarah’s taut blithe fluency, that of an upper-class intellectual; Slater’s bluff, irresistibly British effrontery; Chubb’s defensive meander punctuated with Australian and Malay expressions; Mulaha’s elaborate courtesies; a Chinese-Malaysian woman’s aggressively fractured English—all without benefit of quotation marks. Usually I simply resent deprivation of these helpful, clarifying indicators, but Carey (who didn’t use them in “True History of the Kelly Gang,” either) almost persuades me that human speech, thus unified with the narrative sentences, acquires a certain stateliness, as in the Bible. McCorkle, like the also heroic Ned Kelly, speaks in the near-Biblical accents of a common man whose dignity has been offended:
"I continued strolling until I found a café run by a little reffo fellow in a dirty singlet. I got him to make me a chicken-and-lettuce sandwich and a chocolate malted milk. At dusk I returned to Birdsing’s residence. . . . From the middle of his iris beds I could clearly see the accused through his window. He had a bottle of Victoria Bitter and a meat pie for his dinner. I also live alone and know what it is to spend these hours of solitude when I would rather have a wife and baby and the smell of stew bubbling in the pot. But what civilised person can sit down to a meal like this and not pick up a book to read?"
Even Sarah, confessing to lesbianism, warms into an innocent lilt: “I shocked her often but delighted her all the more, and there was no part of her that was secret to me.” Chubb, though demoralized by his experience of the word made flesh, brings the odd detail sharply to life:
[Mulaha] was very fierce, very definite, like someone accustomed to giving orders, also like a small bird with fixed ideas. He took out a pen and rapped McCorkle’s nose with it.
Carey’s own voice sounds in an arrestingly apt simile: “McCorkle quickly made a bamboo frame on which to lash the naked, mud-caked woman. She was a tiny thing but dense as a bulldog.”
Other reviewers of this folded and refolded tale of mental and physical adventure have claimed its moral to be that everyone depicted is a fake. I don’t see this; the characters are as genuine as their words permit them to be, though all, being characters, are caught up in the business of fiction, which is fakery. ♦︎
First reading
An exceptional novel from Peter Carey. It may even be better than the brilliant True History of the Kelly Gang. I can not recommend it too highly. A dazzler.
July 22, 2019
"Who cares about poetry? Fifty people in Australia? Ten with minds you might respect"
- Peter Carey, My Life as a Fake
I love Peter Carey. If every artist is indeed a thief, Carey is a literary larcenist. I've read three of his novels this year and all were fantastic and all seemed to be written by an inspired ventriloquist who juggles voice-to-voice, scene-to-scene, on a tightrope of his own fancy. He steals stories from the headlines, from history, and bends them and reshapes them to explore themes of art, identity, ideas and ideals. It is messy metafiction. It isn't absolutely fiction. It isn't asolutely origional, but it is entirely strange and magical.
- Peter Carey, My Life as a Fake
I love Peter Carey. If every artist is indeed a thief, Carey is a literary larcenist. I've read three of his novels this year and all were fantastic and all seemed to be written by an inspired ventriloquist who juggles voice-to-voice, scene-to-scene, on a tightrope of his own fancy. He steals stories from the headlines, from history, and bends them and reshapes them to explore themes of art, identity, ideas and ideals. It is messy metafiction. It isn't absolutely fiction. It isn't asolutely origional, but it is entirely strange and magical.
October 1, 2009
Take a real literary hoax from 1940s Australia and mix with Frankenstein...this is what you get. If you are a genius. Lately I am going through a bit of an Australian/New Zealand reading craze. I had never heard of Peter Carey. Now I am a wreck who can't stop thinking about how much I would like to french this guy. I loved the strangeness of it...which seemed very Nabokov to me. I love authors who can take ridiculous set ups and make them so real you dream about nothing else while you're reading the story. The villains seriously gave me cold sweats, and Chubb is so flawed but so pitiful. But most of all, I just adore narrator Sarah. She seems so boring and in love with post-modern crap and unlovable. My least favorite type of character. But then she drops all, and really falls in love with something, the way the best people do. Oh, I could go on for hours. Also, did I mention, this is the book that really does the whole Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now thing best for me. It seems to be one of those books people either hate or love. I am fully on the side of passionate abandon with this one.
October 18, 2016
Şiirin peşinde güzel bir hikayesi, Malezya sokaklarında ilginç bir gezinti ile enterasan bir kurgusu olan bir roman. Yazar 1943 de Avustralya'da yaşanan Ern Malley hilesini kullanarak tasarlamış romanını.
Yer yer tempo fena düşüyor , yan karakterlerin hikayesine çok yer veriyor ve sanırım bütününü biraz bozuyor. Yine de Malezya sokaklarının kokusunu dahi hissedebileceğimiz kadar iyi yazmış detayları. Epey üzerinde çalışılmış bir roman. Tanımadığım ve hiç okumadığım şairler ve şiirleri ilgi uyandırıcıydı.
Başlarda dili biraz garipsedim. Ama sonra kendine alıştırıyor ve daha keyif alıyorsunuz okurken. İlk kez Avustralya'lı bir yazardan okudum. İlgi çekici bir tarzı var. Yer yer Avustralya hakkında da bilgiler veriyor. İki kez Booker ödülünü almış iki yazardan biriymiş kendisi.
Yer yer tempo fena düşüyor , yan karakterlerin hikayesine çok yer veriyor ve sanırım bütününü biraz bozuyor. Yine de Malezya sokaklarının kokusunu dahi hissedebileceğimiz kadar iyi yazmış detayları. Epey üzerinde çalışılmış bir roman. Tanımadığım ve hiç okumadığım şairler ve şiirleri ilgi uyandırıcıydı.
Başlarda dili biraz garipsedim. Ama sonra kendine alıştırıyor ve daha keyif alıyorsunuz okurken. İlk kez Avustralya'lı bir yazardan okudum. İlgi çekici bir tarzı var. Yer yer Avustralya hakkında da bilgiler veriyor. İki kez Booker ödülünü almış iki yazardan biriymiş kendisi.
December 14, 2015
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 can abandon technique and rhythm and create poetry, what was the point of high art? They created this everyman, Ern Malley and submitted poetry under this name to the literary magazine Angry Penguins. The Ern Malley hoax has become one of the biggest literary scandals in Australian history. While the hoax crippled modernist poetry within Australia, ultimately this parody backfired on McAuley and Stewart. The poetry, which was written in a day and full of word plays and puns became a sensation in the 1970’s. Their attempt to parody modern poetry and create something fake turned into something real, beyond their control and is now celebrated as fine examples of surrealist poetry.
Peter Carey’s My Life is a Fake explores the idea of fakery while paying homage to the Ern Malley hoax. Knowledge of this hoax is the backbone of this post-modernist novel, so much so that he covers his thoughts on it in the back of the book. Thinking about this novel I get the idea that this is a book that demands the reader to think about the purpose of reading. While this is considered contemporary fiction, it really demands a lot from the read and it wants to address a number of literary issues. Editor for Monthly Review Sarah Wode-Douglass, while traveling to Kuala Lumpur, encounters the perpetrator of the hoax after many years. The novel goes on to explore the literate mystery of forgeries but I won’t go into too much detail, it is quite a ride.
“I still believe in Ern Malley. (…) For me Ern Malley embodies the true sorrow and pathos of our time. One had felt that somewhere in the streets of every city was an Ern Malley (…) a living person, alone, outside literary cliques, outside print, dying, outside humanity but of it. (…) As I imagined him Ern Malley had something of the soft staring brilliance of Franz Kafka; something of Rilke’s anguished solitude; something of Wilfred Owen’s angry fatalism. And I believe he really walked down Princess Street somewhere in Melbourne. (…) I can still close my eyes and conjure up such a person in our streets. A young person. A person without the protection of the world that comes from living in it. A man outside.” Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins.
While this book is told in a first person narrative, from the perspective of Sarah, as a reader I wrestled with the perspective. The novel explored the life of Sarah, her traveling partner John Slater who she describes as an unapologetically narcissist. Also we learn about Christopher Chubb and his monster, the non-existent Bob McCorkle. My mind wrested with questions like, whose life was I reading about? Whose words am I reading? Whose mythology do I accept? Personally I think these are the questions Carey wants us to ask, also I have to wonder what type of fakery are we talking about in the title?
Now I called the fictional poet Bob McCorkle a monster because this novel is influenced by a lot of literature but the most obvious is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like McAuley and Stewart’s hoax, Bob McCorkle was a monster in the eyes of its creator and takes on a life of its own. There are also references to Paradise Lost (which can be connected to Frankenstein) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. An understanding of Greek mythology is helpful as well, especially Orpheus. This is a tricky book to read, and it took me a while to get the hang of it. Once I got into the rhythm of the novel, I think understanding and progress was a lot easier, though I do think a better understanding of literature would be helpful.
My Life as a Fake explores the power of creation, sometimes it just takes a life on its own with no way of stopping it. We must wrestle with the question of whether the man claiming to be Bob McCorkle is a fanatic; someone with an identity delusion, a hoaxer’s hoaxer, an accident, or an illusion called into being by its creator. As My Life as a Fake is an Australian novel, I can’t help but wonder if this is exploring the idea that Australia doesn’t produce Art, rather parodies and fakeries. The misconception that Australian artist must trade in masquerades to get noticed, a slightly old point of view but one that might have been still relevant in the time of the hoax.
I had to read this book for a university course so I also had to think about post-colonialism (a common theme in the subject). I’m not sure how this works as a post-colonial novel but I have to ask, as a colonized nation is this book viewing Australia as Frankenstein’s monster. Whose country are we in? Why does it matter? Are we the bastard spawn of a powerful creator (England)? Are we just fakes in the eyes of Europeans? Did we start off as fakes that took on a life of its own? Not really important questions for the book but interesting enough to share in this review.
Given that Frankenstein heavily influences My Life as a Fake, does this make this a modern gothic novel? They do invoke similar themes, interesting that this novel is meant to be popular fiction and yet it still explores high art in a complex, post modern way. Makes me wonder just how successful this novel was for Peter Carey. For me, while it was a difficult read, I found pleasure in studying this book, makes me want to read all of Carey’s books, maybe I’ll try The True History of the Ned Kelly Gang next.
This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2014/...
Peter Carey’s My Life is a Fake explores the idea of fakery while paying homage to the Ern Malley hoax. Knowledge of this hoax is the backbone of this post-modernist novel, so much so that he covers his thoughts on it in the back of the book. Thinking about this novel I get the idea that this is a book that demands the reader to think about the purpose of reading. While this is considered contemporary fiction, it really demands a lot from the read and it wants to address a number of literary issues. Editor for Monthly Review Sarah Wode-Douglass, while traveling to Kuala Lumpur, encounters the perpetrator of the hoax after many years. The novel goes on to explore the literate mystery of forgeries but I won’t go into too much detail, it is quite a ride.
“I still believe in Ern Malley. (…) For me Ern Malley embodies the true sorrow and pathos of our time. One had felt that somewhere in the streets of every city was an Ern Malley (…) a living person, alone, outside literary cliques, outside print, dying, outside humanity but of it. (…) As I imagined him Ern Malley had something of the soft staring brilliance of Franz Kafka; something of Rilke’s anguished solitude; something of Wilfred Owen’s angry fatalism. And I believe he really walked down Princess Street somewhere in Melbourne. (…) I can still close my eyes and conjure up such a person in our streets. A young person. A person without the protection of the world that comes from living in it. A man outside.” Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins.
While this book is told in a first person narrative, from the perspective of Sarah, as a reader I wrestled with the perspective. The novel explored the life of Sarah, her traveling partner John Slater who she describes as an unapologetically narcissist. Also we learn about Christopher Chubb and his monster, the non-existent Bob McCorkle. My mind wrested with questions like, whose life was I reading about? Whose words am I reading? Whose mythology do I accept? Personally I think these are the questions Carey wants us to ask, also I have to wonder what type of fakery are we talking about in the title?
Now I called the fictional poet Bob McCorkle a monster because this novel is influenced by a lot of literature but the most obvious is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like McAuley and Stewart’s hoax, Bob McCorkle was a monster in the eyes of its creator and takes on a life of its own. There are also references to Paradise Lost (which can be connected to Frankenstein) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. An understanding of Greek mythology is helpful as well, especially Orpheus. This is a tricky book to read, and it took me a while to get the hang of it. Once I got into the rhythm of the novel, I think understanding and progress was a lot easier, though I do think a better understanding of literature would be helpful.
My Life as a Fake explores the power of creation, sometimes it just takes a life on its own with no way of stopping it. We must wrestle with the question of whether the man claiming to be Bob McCorkle is a fanatic; someone with an identity delusion, a hoaxer’s hoaxer, an accident, or an illusion called into being by its creator. As My Life as a Fake is an Australian novel, I can’t help but wonder if this is exploring the idea that Australia doesn’t produce Art, rather parodies and fakeries. The misconception that Australian artist must trade in masquerades to get noticed, a slightly old point of view but one that might have been still relevant in the time of the hoax.
I had to read this book for a university course so I also had to think about post-colonialism (a common theme in the subject). I’m not sure how this works as a post-colonial novel but I have to ask, as a colonized nation is this book viewing Australia as Frankenstein’s monster. Whose country are we in? Why does it matter? Are we the bastard spawn of a powerful creator (England)? Are we just fakes in the eyes of Europeans? Did we start off as fakes that took on a life of its own? Not really important questions for the book but interesting enough to share in this review.
Given that Frankenstein heavily influences My Life as a Fake, does this make this a modern gothic novel? They do invoke similar themes, interesting that this novel is meant to be popular fiction and yet it still explores high art in a complex, post modern way. Makes me wonder just how successful this novel was for Peter Carey. For me, while it was a difficult read, I found pleasure in studying this book, makes me want to read all of Carey’s books, maybe I’ll try The True History of the Ned Kelly Gang next.
This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2014/...
April 6, 2008
This is the second novel by Peter Cary I have read. His Illegal Self was the first. I liked My Life as a Fake much more. The language is rich and organic mirroring the jungle in which it takes place. The plot pulled my along as well. It kept things a mystery until the end.
The novel is narrated by Sarah Wode-Douglas, the editor of an English poetry magazine. She is traveling with a rich playboy poet who she blames for her mother’s suicide. He drags her to Kuala Lumpur. There she encounters Christopher Chubb, an Australian poet, who disgraced himself by creating a poetry hoax that caused the suicide of the editor of the magazine he fooled. Sarah is pulled into Christopher Chubb's world as she begins to wonder if he is mad, or worse, that his story may in fact be true.
But really, what makes Carey worth reading is his writing. He writes in a deep fashion, thick with simile and metaphor. As my favorite example, the book of poetry, which is the life's work of the fraud created by Chubb becomes, with Carey's language a living thing as alive as its writer is dead. The poet literally poured his soul into his creation. This novel is closely tied to monsters and their creators. It opens with an epigraph from Frankenstein and the theme of the creation of monsters and the monsters breaking free from their creators is one of the many threads running through this book. I recommend it to anyone.
The novel is narrated by Sarah Wode-Douglas, the editor of an English poetry magazine. She is traveling with a rich playboy poet who she blames for her mother’s suicide. He drags her to Kuala Lumpur. There she encounters Christopher Chubb, an Australian poet, who disgraced himself by creating a poetry hoax that caused the suicide of the editor of the magazine he fooled. Sarah is pulled into Christopher Chubb's world as she begins to wonder if he is mad, or worse, that his story may in fact be true.
But really, what makes Carey worth reading is his writing. He writes in a deep fashion, thick with simile and metaphor. As my favorite example, the book of poetry, which is the life's work of the fraud created by Chubb becomes, with Carey's language a living thing as alive as its writer is dead. The poet literally poured his soul into his creation. This novel is closely tied to monsters and their creators. It opens with an epigraph from Frankenstein and the theme of the creation of monsters and the monsters breaking free from their creators is one of the many threads running through this book. I recommend it to anyone.
May 30, 2011
This novel was disjointed, confusing, and annoying. At times there was clever dialogue which kept me going but ultimately it was to no avail as the entire thing collapsed on itself by the end. The story of a poetry magazine editor who travels to Malaysia with an acquaintance, the editor stumbles upon a man who presents a book full of poetry of such high caliber, the editor believes she has discovered the modern TS Elliot. However, with the poems comes the necessity of slowing prying apart the story of the poet who may have constructed a false nom de plume who originally created the works. Somewhere along the lines, Carey has the poet's created author suddenly come to life and its with this development that the novel becomes difficult to follow as well as simply unbelievable. Very unsatisfactory work.
April 27, 2015
Carey uses the infamous Ern Malley Hoax of the 1940s as the core of his novel and investigates, imaginatively, what happens with the hoax and to the people who become embroiled with it.
I’ve thought about hoaxes in the Arts & I don’t think I know of any incident where the originator(s) end up becoming celebrated artists. The closest I can think of is Kreistler’s fake Baroque pieces, which are rarely played and almost never in the concert hall. It shook, but didn’t ruin his reputation. Painters in particular fair worst, next by those in literature, as the Ern Malley hoax testifies. The potential of all the players never reach what it looked like at the time.
Here the hoaxer is Christopher Chubb & his invention is Bob McCorkle. The pic is a pastiche of face parts from newspaper photos, his birth certificate is a forged document and so on. Like Dr Frankenstein, Chubb creates a monster that literally comes to life. What is real and what is in Chubb’s mind is blurred, even causing doubt in the reader by a master storyteller. McCorkle is an allegory and a character. He represents Chubb’s talent and that by creating a hoax, causes his talent to be taken away from him. Forever, whatever he would write is it a pastiche of something else? And then, like the Ern Malley story, the hoax takes on a life that Chubb can no longer control & actually gets some recognition and merit. McCorkle regularly cries that these are HIS poems! The child Chubb has is also a character & allegory. Tina represents Chubb’s tender hopes of future success, but McCorkle takes that as well – in the story physically, but with all hoaxes, metaphysically.
The ending is very Dorian Gray and works well. I shall say no more to preserve the pleasure, but I found it worked well, and continued the cleverness that Carey has carried through the book. One of Carey’s shorter novels, this is tight, funny & witty, clever and enjoyable, and I will recommend it to others.
I’ve thought about hoaxes in the Arts & I don’t think I know of any incident where the originator(s) end up becoming celebrated artists. The closest I can think of is Kreistler’s fake Baroque pieces, which are rarely played and almost never in the concert hall. It shook, but didn’t ruin his reputation. Painters in particular fair worst, next by those in literature, as the Ern Malley hoax testifies. The potential of all the players never reach what it looked like at the time.
Here the hoaxer is Christopher Chubb & his invention is Bob McCorkle. The pic is a pastiche of face parts from newspaper photos, his birth certificate is a forged document and so on. Like Dr Frankenstein, Chubb creates a monster that literally comes to life. What is real and what is in Chubb’s mind is blurred, even causing doubt in the reader by a master storyteller. McCorkle is an allegory and a character. He represents Chubb’s talent and that by creating a hoax, causes his talent to be taken away from him. Forever, whatever he would write is it a pastiche of something else? And then, like the Ern Malley story, the hoax takes on a life that Chubb can no longer control & actually gets some recognition and merit. McCorkle regularly cries that these are HIS poems! The child Chubb has is also a character & allegory. Tina represents Chubb’s tender hopes of future success, but McCorkle takes that as well – in the story physically, but with all hoaxes, metaphysically.
The ending is very Dorian Gray and works well. I shall say no more to preserve the pleasure, but I found it worked well, and continued the cleverness that Carey has carried through the book. One of Carey’s shorter novels, this is tight, funny & witty, clever and enjoyable, and I will recommend it to others.
September 23, 2019
Još jedan naslov kojeg ću se rešiti 😑
September 23, 2019
Stories within stories, unreliable narrators, and the absence of quotes for dialogue are known devices in literature, but when they all come together in this novel, it makes for a complicated soup, that is often not easy reading.
Based on a true story in Australia, where a poet created another fictional one (who produced far superior work than his creator’s and miraculously came to “life” one day), and which led to their editor getting sued on obscenity charges, this novel takes place in Malaysia in the 1980s. Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a prestigious British literary magazine, accompanies her late mother’s former lover, John Slater, himself a celebrated poet, to Malaysia, to come to terms with their relationship that has gone downhill ever since Sarah’s mother committed suicide in a public and gruesome way when Sarah was a child. In Malaysia, they encounter Christopher Chubb, creator of the mythical poet, McCorcle, whose work is supposed to be one of genius, and who got former editor Weiss into trouble on an obscenity charge from which the only escape seemed to be suicide. Are you reasonably confused? Good. It gets worse. McCorcle comes to life during the obscenity trial, hurling insults at Chubb and Weiss across the court until he is escorted out. From that day forth, McCorcle becomes Chubb’s nemesis, kidnapping his daughter, Tina, and destroying Chubb’s literary reputation. Given Slater’s involvement with Chubb’s girlfriend at the time, we are not sure whether he is actually Tina’s father. All this is revealed when Chubb is intent on telling Sarah his story, and Slater is keen to prevent that from happening. For her part, Sarah is only interested in getting her hands on McCorcle’s poetry so she can publish it and save her magazine from the penurious state it is in.
In the telling, and this is a very “told” story, we get vivid descriptions of cultural and historical life in a Malaysia heading towards independence from Britain. The violence exacted on the locals during their brief occupation by the Japanese during World War II is barbarically described by Chubb, as are the local arts of poisoning and decapitation of enemies, and the conduct of local rajas and Kaya Kayas who run their little fiefdoms under British rule. The absence of quote marks and punctuation in the novel made me often wonder who the “I” was. After awhile, I didn’t care, for clarity would eventually emerge from the muddle. And this was my beef - i.e. with Carey’s chosen format. My belief that punctuation was invented to make it easier on the reader was re-affirmed while reading this book. Sure, creative writers often use different variations on the form, they even invent newer forms to replace the old as part of evolving the novel; but sometimes these inventions fail, and I think in this case, it failed. Writing should be invisible and should not distract the reader from the story, and I was often distracted. The writing, when presented this way, also lost its elegance.
The characters are by far the best and most descriptive: Chubb with his leg sores and crumbling suit; McCorckle, the violent giant who is ever-so-gentle towards the kidnapped Tina; Slater who materializes from thin air whenever Sarah is about to interview Chubb; Tina covered with scars; Mulaha, the Jaffna Tamil, who has a poison for every situation; and Sarah herself, whose sexual ambiguity is revealed only midway.
The idea that one’s creation can come back to haunt you, is a good one, like the Frankenstein monster, or Gregor Samsa’s giant insect. This conception poses many questions, though. Is McCorcle Chubb’s soul, as it is implied? Is Chubb himself a ghost, a hantu? Does the soul outlive the person, as we see with McCorcle’s work? Is the soul outside of the person, as we see with Chubb and McCorckle being separate and distinct? Is the soul purer than the person? These questions are left when we finish the book. I’m sure every reader will form his or her opinion on it, and from that standpoint this is a book that does not end with its reading. In an era when fake news takes on a life similar to the real news, we wonder whether Carey is taking us into a twilight zone, or pointing to the real world and saying, “Go find your own McCorcle — he is out there.” (Perhaps, I should have removed the quote marks!)
Based on a true story in Australia, where a poet created another fictional one (who produced far superior work than his creator’s and miraculously came to “life” one day), and which led to their editor getting sued on obscenity charges, this novel takes place in Malaysia in the 1980s. Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a prestigious British literary magazine, accompanies her late mother’s former lover, John Slater, himself a celebrated poet, to Malaysia, to come to terms with their relationship that has gone downhill ever since Sarah’s mother committed suicide in a public and gruesome way when Sarah was a child. In Malaysia, they encounter Christopher Chubb, creator of the mythical poet, McCorcle, whose work is supposed to be one of genius, and who got former editor Weiss into trouble on an obscenity charge from which the only escape seemed to be suicide. Are you reasonably confused? Good. It gets worse. McCorcle comes to life during the obscenity trial, hurling insults at Chubb and Weiss across the court until he is escorted out. From that day forth, McCorcle becomes Chubb’s nemesis, kidnapping his daughter, Tina, and destroying Chubb’s literary reputation. Given Slater’s involvement with Chubb’s girlfriend at the time, we are not sure whether he is actually Tina’s father. All this is revealed when Chubb is intent on telling Sarah his story, and Slater is keen to prevent that from happening. For her part, Sarah is only interested in getting her hands on McCorcle’s poetry so she can publish it and save her magazine from the penurious state it is in.
In the telling, and this is a very “told” story, we get vivid descriptions of cultural and historical life in a Malaysia heading towards independence from Britain. The violence exacted on the locals during their brief occupation by the Japanese during World War II is barbarically described by Chubb, as are the local arts of poisoning and decapitation of enemies, and the conduct of local rajas and Kaya Kayas who run their little fiefdoms under British rule. The absence of quote marks and punctuation in the novel made me often wonder who the “I” was. After awhile, I didn’t care, for clarity would eventually emerge from the muddle. And this was my beef - i.e. with Carey’s chosen format. My belief that punctuation was invented to make it easier on the reader was re-affirmed while reading this book. Sure, creative writers often use different variations on the form, they even invent newer forms to replace the old as part of evolving the novel; but sometimes these inventions fail, and I think in this case, it failed. Writing should be invisible and should not distract the reader from the story, and I was often distracted. The writing, when presented this way, also lost its elegance.
The characters are by far the best and most descriptive: Chubb with his leg sores and crumbling suit; McCorckle, the violent giant who is ever-so-gentle towards the kidnapped Tina; Slater who materializes from thin air whenever Sarah is about to interview Chubb; Tina covered with scars; Mulaha, the Jaffna Tamil, who has a poison for every situation; and Sarah herself, whose sexual ambiguity is revealed only midway.
The idea that one’s creation can come back to haunt you, is a good one, like the Frankenstein monster, or Gregor Samsa’s giant insect. This conception poses many questions, though. Is McCorcle Chubb’s soul, as it is implied? Is Chubb himself a ghost, a hantu? Does the soul outlive the person, as we see with McCorcle’s work? Is the soul outside of the person, as we see with Chubb and McCorckle being separate and distinct? Is the soul purer than the person? These questions are left when we finish the book. I’m sure every reader will form his or her opinion on it, and from that standpoint this is a book that does not end with its reading. In an era when fake news takes on a life similar to the real news, we wonder whether Carey is taking us into a twilight zone, or pointing to the real world and saying, “Go find your own McCorcle — he is out there.” (Perhaps, I should have removed the quote marks!)
November 16, 2010
The lyrical, elegant prose seduced me from page 1.
How could I resist this?
“That same year I was born… to a beautiful, impatient Australian mother and a no less handsome but rather posh English father, Lord Wiliam Wode-Douglass, generally known as Boofy.”
This book is based on the infamous Ern Malley scandal that took place in the 1940’s in Australia.
The story in the novel is about a hoax avant-garde poet who is created by a conservative academic named Christopher Chubb. He does this to teach his country and peers a lesson about pretenciousness and authenticity. He is angry that his poetry is ignored and decides to test the literary magazines.
His ‘monster’, Bob McCorkle is hailed as a master of surrealist verse. The magazine who publishes his work is also sued and found guilty of publishing obscene literature.
However, his creation, Bob McCorkle, comes to life. And like the monster in Shelley’s, Frankenstein, he is pursued, tormented and destroyed by his creation. At the trial, a man resembling the pasted together- photograph Chubb created of McCorkle interrupts the court proceedings.
Chubb has to confront and deal with the creature he invented. McCorkle kidnaps Chubb’s daughter in the twisted hope that he will ‘acquire’ a childhood.
My Life as a Fake is a masterfully crafted book that could have been dry and boring but is well-paced and held my attention without any problems at all.
I have become a Peter Carey fan – much to my surprise.
Carey has won the Booker prize twice and this kudos usually leaves me cold as I find many of the winners to be academics chosen by academics feeding and stroking each other’s egos. Much like the topics dealt with in this novel!
How could I resist this?
“That same year I was born… to a beautiful, impatient Australian mother and a no less handsome but rather posh English father, Lord Wiliam Wode-Douglass, generally known as Boofy.”
This book is based on the infamous Ern Malley scandal that took place in the 1940’s in Australia.
The story in the novel is about a hoax avant-garde poet who is created by a conservative academic named Christopher Chubb. He does this to teach his country and peers a lesson about pretenciousness and authenticity. He is angry that his poetry is ignored and decides to test the literary magazines.
His ‘monster’, Bob McCorkle is hailed as a master of surrealist verse. The magazine who publishes his work is also sued and found guilty of publishing obscene literature.
However, his creation, Bob McCorkle, comes to life. And like the monster in Shelley’s, Frankenstein, he is pursued, tormented and destroyed by his creation. At the trial, a man resembling the pasted together- photograph Chubb created of McCorkle interrupts the court proceedings.
Chubb has to confront and deal with the creature he invented. McCorkle kidnaps Chubb’s daughter in the twisted hope that he will ‘acquire’ a childhood.
My Life as a Fake is a masterfully crafted book that could have been dry and boring but is well-paced and held my attention without any problems at all.
I have become a Peter Carey fan – much to my surprise.
Carey has won the Booker prize twice and this kudos usually leaves me cold as I find many of the winners to be academics chosen by academics feeding and stroking each other’s egos. Much like the topics dealt with in this novel!
March 4, 2009
Slow to get into, but once you do, you are taken on a whirlwind tour of a chase through Malaysia. Care's novel ends in a rather open-ended fashion, leaving you wondering how much of the story to believe.
***
I went to bed with the disconcerting knowledge that almost everything I had assumed about my life was incorrect, that I had been baptised in blood and raised on secrets and misconstructions which had, obviously, made me who I was (133).
***
I went to bed with the disconcerting knowledge that almost everything I had assumed about my life was incorrect, that I had been baptised in blood and raised on secrets and misconstructions which had, obviously, made me who I was (133).
August 1, 2012
This is a work that aims high, but ends up forgetting what its target was in the first place. If allowing Frankenstein to give an Asian travelogue is a brave move, telling the story via three unreliable narrators is perhaps a foolhardy one, which gives the novel it's disjointed feel. The early scenes are all based around empathising with the narrator as she's thrown into confusion regarding her present and past, and getting to know her via the meetings with the novels two other central characters.
However, the focus shifts towards the end, and suddenly the narrator is no longer the important character, and indeed we barely deal with her at all anymore, as a fairly straight-forward narration is given by the mysterious faker Chubb. Which leads to the great descriptive writing, and the beautiful mood really crumbling apart and falling into a blind alley. The third character, Slater, becomes so extraneous to the story that his motivation and early predominance prove slightly ludicrous and irrelevant.
Lovely poetry, though, both as quoted and just in the general usage of language. Disappointingly wasted.
However, the focus shifts towards the end, and suddenly the narrator is no longer the important character, and indeed we barely deal with her at all anymore, as a fairly straight-forward narration is given by the mysterious faker Chubb. Which leads to the great descriptive writing, and the beautiful mood really crumbling apart and falling into a blind alley. The third character, Slater, becomes so extraneous to the story that his motivation and early predominance prove slightly ludicrous and irrelevant.
Lovely poetry, though, both as quoted and just in the general usage of language. Disappointingly wasted.
April 21, 2022
This is Peter Carey after all, so this must be a really good book - probably far too clever for the likes of me.
Because it is confusing, a jumble of words and dialect and characters that slip into one another with no discernible boundaries, time, place and narrative switches, obscure literary references and an ongoing supposition that the reader needs to be "in the know" to be good enough to even begin to understand what is going on here.
So I admit, I'm clearly not clever enough, as I just couldn't make head nor tail of this. If you enjoyed it - and some people did - then you're better than me, well done. I can't even begin to explain really what goes on here - an editor gets attracted to go to Kuala Lumpur to do what exactly, I'm not sure, but it's something to do with a poet (or quite possibly quite a few poets) who may or may not be writing completely brilliant (or maybe banal) poetry and.....as you can see, it was far too clever for me.
I gave it up about 100 pages in as I realized I was just giving my self a physical and metaphorical headache just trying to navigate from one sentence to the next - too good for me, this one!
Because it is confusing, a jumble of words and dialect and characters that slip into one another with no discernible boundaries, time, place and narrative switches, obscure literary references and an ongoing supposition that the reader needs to be "in the know" to be good enough to even begin to understand what is going on here.
So I admit, I'm clearly not clever enough, as I just couldn't make head nor tail of this. If you enjoyed it - and some people did - then you're better than me, well done. I can't even begin to explain really what goes on here - an editor gets attracted to go to Kuala Lumpur to do what exactly, I'm not sure, but it's something to do with a poet (or quite possibly quite a few poets) who may or may not be writing completely brilliant (or maybe banal) poetry and.....as you can see, it was far too clever for me.
I gave it up about 100 pages in as I realized I was just giving my self a physical and metaphorical headache just trying to navigate from one sentence to the next - too good for me, this one!
February 29, 2024
while reading the third chapter the thought crossed my mind that this might be my favorite novel—that I might be reading my favorite novel for the first time—and that idea gestated over the next days as I read on, rapt, to the point that now, just having finished it, I’m convinced that this is my favorite novel, my new favorite, having usurped the counterfeiters… though somehow leaving me equally sure that this is a just trick that the book played on me
February 3, 2009
This was my first Peter Carey, and if others say it is not his best, I'll definitely have to read his other works. I may have been predestined to like it because I work in the publishing world.
I disagree with people who say that it is confusing in content or in the way it is written. I like the jumps back and forth between "present day" and the past. One aspect that may be confusing is whether or not Chubb is crazy (or rather, how crazy), so it reads a bit like a psychological thriller. Carey leaves this question pretty open-ended so it might be found unsatisfactory in that respect.
I would have enjoyed a little more development of the Sarah towards the end, or more references to her own past, though I understand her obsession blurs the line between herself and Chubb's story.
I disagree with people who say that it is confusing in content or in the way it is written. I like the jumps back and forth between "present day" and the past. One aspect that may be confusing is whether or not Chubb is crazy (or rather, how crazy), so it reads a bit like a psychological thriller. Carey leaves this question pretty open-ended so it might be found unsatisfactory in that respect.
I would have enjoyed a little more development of the Sarah towards the end, or more references to her own past, though I understand her obsession blurs the line between herself and Chubb's story.
August 19, 2016
Πολύ έξυπνη η αρχική ιδέα, με πολλές προεκτάσεις. Θα μου άρεσε περισσότερο αν ήταν λιγότερο φλύαρο και αν η μετάφραση δεν ήταν τόσο μα τόσο κακή (είχε και επιμελήτρια, τρομάρα τους).
May 27, 2020
This novel began so well and ended up being a disappointment. I love the novel's premise, its reinterpretation of Frankenstein's story (but this time taking on creativity and not science). But what began as a fascinating, philosophical exploration of identity, literary world and its milieu, and creative process, metamorphosed in the second half of the book into a fable/fairytale-like story of improbable adventures in 'exotic lands'. What was a very 'adult', mature, ironic and reflective story turned into a juvenile, and gruesome, action tale with no interesting (or just no...) answers to the intriguing questions raised at the start. (For example: can a poet be more gifted when writing under a fake identity than in 'his' voice?) And the sub-story of the narrator's own past trauma, and generally her life, ended up being completely irrelevant to the story and left me cold. It feels to me as if Carey took on here a topic too mighty for him and, not knowing what to do with his initial material, opted for some colorful action instead. But still, the pace and language in this book are lively and there were many passages, even towards the end, that I enjoyed reading just for the sake of voice.
August 5, 2024
Never quite escapes from the kitsch
May 15, 2014
This review is from: My Life as a Fake (Paperback)
The problem with a 5 point scale for reviews is that scores are so unrefined. I never thought that I would be awarding such a celebrated author 3 stars. However, Amazon reviewers can only score against a measure that is relevant to the kind of work, or the kind of author. In this case, 3 stars represents my opinion of this novel in comparison with Peter Carey's others.
Early on, the narrator is shown to have had the cheek to send critical suggestions to famous poets when she was a schoolgirl of fourteen. What a cheek! And I find myself showing the same 'cheek' in criticising this novelist.
The structure is that of the Russian dolls, a narrator narrating a narrator's story, and that story frequently quoting the story of another and another. This is masterly, but spoiled for me by the relative lack of speech marks. It meant I had to keep checking, sometimes unsuccessfully, who was speaking. I became irritated by the excessive delay in revelations. The author intended this, playing with the fake within a fake concept. The origin of the literary fake was a fact.
The narrator is a woman editor of strong character, and she does come over clearly despite spending most of her time listening, and reluctantly recording the story of Chubb, the faker.
She is constantly interrupted and invaded by her companion, also a character who shone out clearly. John turns out to be less heinous than originally thought, but by that time, the reader hates him.
I did admire the images Peter Carey summons up, such as the moving black bin liner outside the narrator's window, which turns out to be Chubb waiting in pouring rain for her attention.
The focus of all the action is Chubb's book, or rather some poetry within it. Who has written it, can Chubb's account of events be believed, despite its extravagant inter weavings?
I have probably increased the likelihood of attracting further readers, rather than the reverse. They will be those who enjoy sitting with someone else's knitting, unravelling its knots and waverings without getting irritated. I am not of this orientation. `i did get irritated and if the morality of the end satisfied me, not much else did.
The problem with a 5 point scale for reviews is that scores are so unrefined. I never thought that I would be awarding such a celebrated author 3 stars. However, Amazon reviewers can only score against a measure that is relevant to the kind of work, or the kind of author. In this case, 3 stars represents my opinion of this novel in comparison with Peter Carey's others.
Early on, the narrator is shown to have had the cheek to send critical suggestions to famous poets when she was a schoolgirl of fourteen. What a cheek! And I find myself showing the same 'cheek' in criticising this novelist.
The structure is that of the Russian dolls, a narrator narrating a narrator's story, and that story frequently quoting the story of another and another. This is masterly, but spoiled for me by the relative lack of speech marks. It meant I had to keep checking, sometimes unsuccessfully, who was speaking. I became irritated by the excessive delay in revelations. The author intended this, playing with the fake within a fake concept. The origin of the literary fake was a fact.
The narrator is a woman editor of strong character, and she does come over clearly despite spending most of her time listening, and reluctantly recording the story of Chubb, the faker.
She is constantly interrupted and invaded by her companion, also a character who shone out clearly. John turns out to be less heinous than originally thought, but by that time, the reader hates him.
I did admire the images Peter Carey summons up, such as the moving black bin liner outside the narrator's window, which turns out to be Chubb waiting in pouring rain for her attention.
The focus of all the action is Chubb's book, or rather some poetry within it. Who has written it, can Chubb's account of events be believed, despite its extravagant inter weavings?
I have probably increased the likelihood of attracting further readers, rather than the reverse. They will be those who enjoy sitting with someone else's knitting, unravelling its knots and waverings without getting irritated. I am not of this orientation. `i did get irritated and if the morality of the end satisfied me, not much else did.
March 28, 2012
The strangest, craziest part of this book is that it is inspired by true events. (Two guys on a military base in Australia invent a poet, who is deemed the next literary genius, before the whole hoax comes out.) Peter Carey injects a Frankenstein note: what if the made-up character were to then come to life by someone claiming to be the poet? I loved the premise, but the romp through Malaysia (jungles! machetes! natives!) seemed a little unnecessary, and the plot got confusing. Part of me wondered why he didn't just keep with the original story, which seemed amazing enough on its own. I mean, can you imagine, deciding to invent a genius? And then having it work? This wasn't my favorite Peter Carey (_Parrot & Olivier_ was better), but I still enjoyed it.
April 22, 2010
Unfortunately, Bob McCorkle isn't the only fake thing in this book.
Disturbingly false is Carey's portrayal of artistic genius as supernatural zombie magic, instead of the 90% perspiration that it is.
And that even isn't as hollow as the notion that an old Chinese lady in a motorcycle shop in K.L. named Mrs. Lim must be a feral machete psychokiller.
Carey's plot is so convoluted that this isn't a spoiler.
Disturbingly false is Carey's portrayal of artistic genius as supernatural zombie magic, instead of the 90% perspiration that it is.
And that even isn't as hollow as the notion that an old Chinese lady in a motorcycle shop in K.L. named Mrs. Lim must be a feral machete psychokiller.
Carey's plot is so convoluted that this isn't a spoiler.
March 5, 2011
BORING!!! Does winning a Booker prize mean you can then write as much rubbish as you like and still get it on the bestseller list? Is sprinkling your story (and I use the term loosely) with poetry and references to the lives of poets all you have to do to be "literary"? If that's the case, that means I should be able to weave nursery rhymes into a bad narrative and have it hailed as great literature..... I don't think I'll waste any more of my precious time reading his books.
May 25, 2018
An excellent literary entertainment, part Graham Greene (without the religion), part puzzle, part quest. What’s best about the novel is its narration (by a young woman poetry magazine editor), the way it pops around in time and embraces the stories told primarily by two middle-aged men (in and out of first and third person), but occasionally by others. Carey produced a great narrative voice and a freewheeling structure that only a highly self-confident writer can pull off.
July 18, 2009
So, about 1/3 of the way through this, I knew for sure that I had already read this, but couldn't remember where it was going. It was definitely interesting, although I couldn't really say that I liked it as I read. When it ended (very abruptly) I realized why I didn't remember it. meh.
August 11, 2024
A book littered with fascinating ideas and complex, intriguing characters - most notably Christopher Chubb. Positively, 'My Life As A Fake' deals with themes akin to Shelley's Frankenstein. This conjurs up evidently exciting prospects within the context of poetry, such as what happens when a poet's creation/hoax becomes real? And tortures its creator? This part is enjoyed thoroughly when it's first introduced but, by the latter half of the story, Frankenstein Monster's becomes Frankenstein's Mess. Chubb's creation of McCorkle shines when it's 'grounded' but embedded in mystery. Once Chubb's daughter is kidnapped, the mystery is replaced by a convolution of events. These narratives are too plentiful, or to be better put it - multiple narratives are not aided by the writing style. To keep track of 'who said what' becomes laborious after 150 pages, especially considering the various time jumps. A lack of quotation marks is the culprit for this chore. Whilst in books such as 'Normal People', a lack of quotation marks evokes intimacy, here it evokes confusion.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 15, 2013
In book after book, Peter Carey has proven that he's incapable of writing a dull page. He's a literary Robin Hood, stealing from rich moments of history or literature and giving to poor readers. The brazenness of his recent projects makes their success all the more exciting. In "Jack Maggs" (1998), he dared to finish off Dickens's "Great Expectations." In "True History of the Kelly Gang" (2001), he mythologized Australia's greatest robber.
Reading his new work, "My Life As a Fake," about a celebrated case of fraud after World War II, is like falling into an Escher drawing. With stories nested in stories, narrators narrating the narratives of other narrators - it all sounds like the kind of poststructural challenge A.S. Byatt would twist into a migraine of complexity, but Carey never forgets that it's about entertaining a reader. As the Booker Prize has noted - twice - he's one of the greatest storytellers alive, the perfect qualification for this novel all about storytelling.
Miss Sarah Wode- Douglass introduces herself as the editor of a London poetry magazine who has long hated a popular poet named John Slater. "He was an appallingly unapologetic narcissist," she writes, who played a suspicious role in her mother's suicide decades earlier when Sarah was a child. Determined to end her confirmed chilliness toward him, Slater proposes she accompany him to Malaysia, the country that inspired his first collection of poetry. The 10-day trip, all expenses paid, will give them a chance to talk. "We must talk," he insists. "It is very bad that we never have."
She gives in to his plea, but he sleeps through the entire flight, and as soon as they arrive in Malaysia, he flits off to pursue his own interests. Angry with him and bored of editing in her room, one afternoon she wanders outside the hotel and spots a grotesque Australian named Chubb, "a strange and fragile creature, powerless, pathetic, filled with pride and self-importance." He wants her to read a decaying page of verse by Bob McCorkle, but she already knows the story of that notorious hoax.
Just after the war, Chubb destroyed another young poetry editor by submitting a collection of cobbled-together verse. He invented "Bob McCorkle," an unschooled genius, now deceased, and a sister who sent in the poems along with a manufactured photo and a description of her brother's simple life. The editor fell for it just as Chubb hoped he would, but the prank quickly spun out of control, becoming the subject of a scandal and then an obscenity trial, which inspired the humiliated editor to kill himself.
Of course, the incident ended Chubb's own writing career, and Sarah can't imagine why he should approach her now to replay that ghastly farce. "Chubb had preyed on the best, most vulnerable quality an editor has to offer," she seethes. "I mean that hopeful, optimistic part which has you reading garbage for half your life just so you might find, one day before you die, a great and unknown talent."
But before she can send Chubb packing, she reads the grimy page of verse he offers. "I approached these 20 lines with both suspicion and hostility," she admits, but "my heart was beating very fast indeed. Rereading the fragment, I felt that excitement in my blood which is the only thing an editor should ever trust." She's hooked, despite herself.
Determined to see more of the McCorkle manuscript, she promises to write a profile about Chubb, while he bribes her into listening to his life story by promising more poems. "I loathe dishonesty," he begins dishonestly, claiming he invented that notorious prank only to teach a snobby young editor a lesson: that he was too infatuated with shallow literary trends, that he couldn't spot the truth of great literature.
"If what I did sounds cruel it will only be to people with no appreciation of art," Chubb insists. But the editor's death was only the first of many unintended tragedies. At the absurd obscenity trial that followed publication of the fraudulent poems, a madman named Bob McCorkle rose up from the gallery and denounced the prosecution.
From that moment, Chubb's life became a deadly struggle with this monster he brought forth. "How do I know from where?" Chubb sighs. "From hell, I suppose. I imagined someone and he came into being." Once the humiliated editor was dead, McCorkle hounded Chubb, reciting "his" poetry, demanding a birth certificate, and insisting on a childhood to fill out his existence. When Chubb couldn't comply, McCorkle kidnapped his baby and fled into the jungle of Indonesia, setting in motion a 15-year chase, a deadly cycle of revenge, and a volley of allusions to Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, and Franz Kafka.
Of course, Sarah sees this ancient mariner's tale as a pathetic fiction of self-justification, but it's so captivating - to her and us. And the physical fact of McCorkle's breathtaking poetry along with other details that Carey wickedly taunts us with make it impossible to determine where Chubb's testimony crosses into psychosis. The difficulty of untangling this web of mysteries is compounded when Sarah finally talks with Slater about her mother's suicide and realizes that she's fictionalized significant portions of her own past as well.
In typical Carey style, all this races along in a dazzling narrative that binds us to Sarah's plight, swinging between certainty and doubt, tearing through the tissue that separates what we know from what is true. One can't help running through this labyrinth of deceit in a kind of panic, searching for the end, hoping it won't come.
Originally published in The Christian Science Monitor.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1023/p1...
Reading his new work, "My Life As a Fake," about a celebrated case of fraud after World War II, is like falling into an Escher drawing. With stories nested in stories, narrators narrating the narratives of other narrators - it all sounds like the kind of poststructural challenge A.S. Byatt would twist into a migraine of complexity, but Carey never forgets that it's about entertaining a reader. As the Booker Prize has noted - twice - he's one of the greatest storytellers alive, the perfect qualification for this novel all about storytelling.
Miss Sarah Wode- Douglass introduces herself as the editor of a London poetry magazine who has long hated a popular poet named John Slater. "He was an appallingly unapologetic narcissist," she writes, who played a suspicious role in her mother's suicide decades earlier when Sarah was a child. Determined to end her confirmed chilliness toward him, Slater proposes she accompany him to Malaysia, the country that inspired his first collection of poetry. The 10-day trip, all expenses paid, will give them a chance to talk. "We must talk," he insists. "It is very bad that we never have."
She gives in to his plea, but he sleeps through the entire flight, and as soon as they arrive in Malaysia, he flits off to pursue his own interests. Angry with him and bored of editing in her room, one afternoon she wanders outside the hotel and spots a grotesque Australian named Chubb, "a strange and fragile creature, powerless, pathetic, filled with pride and self-importance." He wants her to read a decaying page of verse by Bob McCorkle, but she already knows the story of that notorious hoax.
Just after the war, Chubb destroyed another young poetry editor by submitting a collection of cobbled-together verse. He invented "Bob McCorkle," an unschooled genius, now deceased, and a sister who sent in the poems along with a manufactured photo and a description of her brother's simple life. The editor fell for it just as Chubb hoped he would, but the prank quickly spun out of control, becoming the subject of a scandal and then an obscenity trial, which inspired the humiliated editor to kill himself.
Of course, the incident ended Chubb's own writing career, and Sarah can't imagine why he should approach her now to replay that ghastly farce. "Chubb had preyed on the best, most vulnerable quality an editor has to offer," she seethes. "I mean that hopeful, optimistic part which has you reading garbage for half your life just so you might find, one day before you die, a great and unknown talent."
But before she can send Chubb packing, she reads the grimy page of verse he offers. "I approached these 20 lines with both suspicion and hostility," she admits, but "my heart was beating very fast indeed. Rereading the fragment, I felt that excitement in my blood which is the only thing an editor should ever trust." She's hooked, despite herself.
Determined to see more of the McCorkle manuscript, she promises to write a profile about Chubb, while he bribes her into listening to his life story by promising more poems. "I loathe dishonesty," he begins dishonestly, claiming he invented that notorious prank only to teach a snobby young editor a lesson: that he was too infatuated with shallow literary trends, that he couldn't spot the truth of great literature.
"If what I did sounds cruel it will only be to people with no appreciation of art," Chubb insists. But the editor's death was only the first of many unintended tragedies. At the absurd obscenity trial that followed publication of the fraudulent poems, a madman named Bob McCorkle rose up from the gallery and denounced the prosecution.
From that moment, Chubb's life became a deadly struggle with this monster he brought forth. "How do I know from where?" Chubb sighs. "From hell, I suppose. I imagined someone and he came into being." Once the humiliated editor was dead, McCorkle hounded Chubb, reciting "his" poetry, demanding a birth certificate, and insisting on a childhood to fill out his existence. When Chubb couldn't comply, McCorkle kidnapped his baby and fled into the jungle of Indonesia, setting in motion a 15-year chase, a deadly cycle of revenge, and a volley of allusions to Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, and Franz Kafka.
Of course, Sarah sees this ancient mariner's tale as a pathetic fiction of self-justification, but it's so captivating - to her and us. And the physical fact of McCorkle's breathtaking poetry along with other details that Carey wickedly taunts us with make it impossible to determine where Chubb's testimony crosses into psychosis. The difficulty of untangling this web of mysteries is compounded when Sarah finally talks with Slater about her mother's suicide and realizes that she's fictionalized significant portions of her own past as well.
In typical Carey style, all this races along in a dazzling narrative that binds us to Sarah's plight, swinging between certainty and doubt, tearing through the tissue that separates what we know from what is true. One can't help running through this labyrinth of deceit in a kind of panic, searching for the end, hoping it won't come.
Originally published in The Christian Science Monitor.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1023/p1...
February 26, 2024
Truly Carey’s masterpiece, holding up even years later reading it the second time. A world where nothing is real, every character and every event is a deception, a misdirection, a hoax and/or a joke, a beautiful world of words with deadly consequences. This has an oddly modern resonance, even though it was written before fake news and liars as politicos were really a thing, still relevant as a testament to truth. Carey makes you believe that words matter.
August 27, 2020
Mystifying. By the end of it I was completely confused as to what was real and what was not. But, I suppose that was the intention. Carey's character construction is brilliant. The narrative twists and turns in bizarre directions. It was a "page turner" because I was racing to the end to find a resolution, only to find I was still left "up in the air".
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