Synopsis
Based on a famous hoax perpetrated in Australia in 1943, Peter Carey explores imagination and its relation to fact in this novel about a woman named Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of The Modern Review, who travels to Kuala Lumpur. There she finds Christopher Chubb, who tells her an amazing story: he passed off his own poems as works by a brilliant but nonexistent poet named Bob McCorkle. When the hoax was uncovered, Chubb was ruined--and McCorkle became real and sought revenge on his creator. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2003-10-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 265 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in | | Width: | 6.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 19.2 oz |
Publisher's Note
In his remarkable new novel, the two-time Booker-winning author Peter Carey creates a Creature as indelible as Frankenstein.
In Melbourne in the 1950s, an arrogant young Australian poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach his country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. Choosing as his target the trendiest of the literary magazines, he submits for publication the entire oeuvre of one Bob McCorkle, a working class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at twenty-four and entirely the product of Chubb’s imagination. Not only does the magazine fall for the hoax, but the local authorities also sue its editor for publishing obscenity. At the trial someone uncannily resembling the faked photograph of the invented McCorkle leaps to his feet. At this moment a horrified Chubb is confronted by the malevolent being he has himself manufactured.
Using as a springboard a real literary hoax that transfixed Australia in his boyhood, Peter Carey wickedly and ruefully explores how the phantom poet taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker, pursuing Chubb from Melbourne to a seedy, sweaty, bitter ending in the tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur. Inexorably the Creature steals Chubb’s life, eclipsing him as a poet and a man. In a twist that is truly devilish, Chubb’s own existence finally comes to depend on the Creature’s “real” unpublished poems.
Peter Carey has composed a manic, endearing and penetrating ode to fakery at its most truthful and truth at its most fake, a novel that penetrates to the heart of the alchemy of literature itself.
Industry Reviews
"This is a great octopus of a novel, every tentacle stretched out and fixed round the dark, inky centre of the hoax and the monstrous phantom born of it. There is a great deal of violence in the novel, with scalpings and beatings, and masterly descriptions of a man reduced to little more than pathetic beggary. The language is simple and faultless; the complexity of thought is deep and moving. Twice a Booker Prize winner, Carey is without a doubt in the running for a third."
Literary Review (09/01/2003)
"MY LIFE AS A FAKE is odd and a bit ungainly, but despite its jitteriness, it's far from second rate. Even when Peter Carey thinks he's faking it, he's the real thing."
New York Times Book Review - Terrence Rafferty (11/09/2003)
"Peter Carey's new novel...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...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....Carey's prose is up to any task he sets it....[T]he 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."
New Yorker - John Updike (11/24/2003)
"[T]he novel's high-spirited postmodernism, its teasing games with fiction and reality, its range of voices and styles and places, its sadness and comedy, are all less important than the fact that [the characters] are alive. Carey can bring a character to life, give him a voice and a history and a psychological topography, in a single paragraph."
Times Literary Supplement - John Lanchester (01/15/2003)
"Carey's corker of a plot...delivers surprise after surprise and peaks with a masterly extended set-piece....Issues of artistic inspiration, integrity, and authenticity are thus brilliantly allegorized in a wonderland of a yarn....A Nabokovian masterpiece."
Kirkus (09/01/2003)
"This hall of mirrors reads like the impossible offspring of a fictional ménage-à-trois involving PALE FIRE, LORD JIM, and OUR MAN IN HAVANA....This is a fabulous book in the original sense of the term--and in the other one, too."
Atlantic Monthly - Michael Gorra (11/01/2003)
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