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Two-time Booker Prize winning writer Peter Carey has a knack for transporting the reader into a slice of history, even though Carey is a novelist. Carey’s last book, The True History of the Kelly Gang, was a set of imagined letters written by a real life Australian folk hero. In his new novel, My Life as a Fake, Carey starts with the true story of a literary hoax and creates a modern Frankenstein story. When the editor of a small poetry journal encounters exiled Australian poet Christopher Chubb in a grimy Malaysian bicycle shop, she’s drawn into his story of how a fictitious poet Chubb created became real and ruined Chubb’s life.
If this show is made available via streaming media, I’ll update this with a link: it was really good.
<UPDATE>here it is.
I just read this book and liked it, though as the interviewer said, it goes along pretty quickly. The story turns out to be a page turner and I was done before I was ready to be . . . .
What I found interesting about the conversation was how his books start. He has an idea, and just plays with and builds on it, without regard for if the book will be Literature or more accessible fare. (In fact there was a joke in the program about a book that was praised for its scholarship, it’s insights, everything about it, except it was too accessible: snobbery pops up everywhere).
I have read almost everything of Carey‘s (I never finished “Kelly Gang” as it was depressing me) and he defies any categorization. His books are set in modern times, Victorian times, on the Australian frontier (the Kelly book could be considered a Western but the skill of the writer makes it a different kind of Western entirely: more genre-busting), and even some touches of “magical realism.”
And the Ern Malley story is dear to my heart, as well.