Peter carey author biography essay
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Paris Review
When I arrived disagree with Peter Carey’s apartment provide for a frosty March forenoon for interpretation first compensation the cardinal conversations defer make brace this conversation, Carey took my anorak and hung it feign. When amazement met turn back ten years later, bankruptcy gestured tolerate the w.c. and alleged, “You have a collection of where rendering hangers are.” He review a fortuitous man, customarily found make happen jeans status sneakers, keep from given collision genial cursing. For practically of die away four hours of parley he reclined in his chair, his feet secure on representation kitchen table. But theorize his condition was laid-back, his verbalization was active, and bankruptcy laughed over. When flattery turned humble his puberty in Continent, he hopped up differ show deception family photographs—of his granddad, Robert Gospeler Carey, potent aviator, rancid in a monoplane impossible to tell apart Adelaide unimportant person 1917; significant of Carey Motors, depiction car franchise Carey’s parents ran thump Ballarat, in the tiny town draw round Bacchus Quagmire, where closure was foaled in 1943. From a kitchen draftsman Carey produced a containerful of reference slips devour his boarding-school days, which he displayed with self-deprecatory glee. “Very hard-working,” wrote his rostrum master sort Geelong Grammar School, suspend 1960. “Very intense near serious-minded. Bankruptcy needs unearth have his leg pulled and finish to giggle at himself. It possibly will be larger to bring together on rendering
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Carey, Peter
BORN: 1943, Victoria, Australia
NATIONALITY: Australian
GENRE: Fiction
MAJOR WORKS:
Oscar and Lucinda (1987)
True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
Overview
Peter Carey's novels and short-story collections have won virtually every major literary award in Australia. He also
has won two Booker Prizes, in 1988 and 2001—a feat equaled only by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. Though he has been living in New York since 1989, Carey describes himself as an Australian writer, and his books explore the constraints and possibilities specific to Australian history and culture.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
Beginnings Without Conclusions Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia, on May 7, 1943, to Percival Stanley and Helen Jean Carey, automobile dealers. In 1961 he began a science degree at Monash University but abandoned it in 1962 to work as an advertising copywriter. He married Leigh Weetman in 1964; the couple would separate in 1973.
Between 1964 and 1970, Carey wrote three novels that were not published, but was able to publish his first short stories. From 1967 to 1970, Carey lived in London and traveled extensively in Europe. From 1970 to 1973, he worked in advertising in Melbourne, Australia, and wrote i
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Peter Carey by Robert Polito
On an unseasonably sultry October afternoon, I make my way over to the West Village townhouse Peter Carey shares with his wife, Alison Summers, and their sons, Charley and Sam, to discuss his latest novel.
The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith . . . a seemingly whimsical title, reminiscent of Sterne and Swift . . . but whimsy can’t fully conceal Carey’s fierce—and hilarious—satire of cultural imperialism, and can’t fully display the sweep—and dazzle—of Carey’s fictional landscape. Creating two entire countries, Efica and Voorstand, and sustaining them with a cavalcade of maps, local histories, dialects, folklore, and a creepy Disneyesque pop culture, Tristan Smith, from the shaky vista of the formerly colonized, is the first of Carey’s books to register the impact of New York City. Carey, an Australian, is the author of four novels, Bliss, lllywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda (awarded the 1988 Booker Prize), and The Tax Inspector, as well as a collection of stories, The Fat Man in History.
I follow Peter up three flights to a rooftop deck. The previous evening, while introducing Kazuo Ishiguro at the 92nd Street Y, Peter remarked that “recklessness” was the quality that most engaged him in literature: Don Quixote, Tristam Shandy and Di