Carey, Peter
My Life as a Fake with limited edition DVD.
ISBN: 
Book Number: 49855
Milson's Point, N.S.W. Random House Australia 2003 8vo hardcover 280pp. comes with limited edition dvd 778/1000, the dvd has an interview with Peter Carey on it. fine / near fine d/w, rough cut page edges, ribbon place marker. Po name stamp on fep. In his remarkable new novel, two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey creates a Creature as indelible as Frankenstein's. My Life as a Fake is a fantastical gothic tale, in part inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, about a hoax poet who mysteriously materialises and then pursues, taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker. Peter Carey uses the Ern Malley hoax as a springboard, but the leap he takes is into the realms of richly imagined fiction. Sara, an English poetry editor on holiday in Kuala Lumpur, stumbles upon an Australian, Christopher Chubb, reading Rilke in a bicycle shop. The man shows her a scrap of poetry the like of which she's never seen. She becomes determined to get her hands on the poetry, to publish in (and revive) her ailing poetry journal. Chubb insists that Sara hear his story first. His tale is told over many sittings, and is the central story of My Life as a Fake. As a conservative young poet in Melbourne in the 1950s, Chubb decided to teach the country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. Choosing as his target the most avant-garde of the literary magazines, he submitted 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 did the magazine fall for the hoax, but its editor was prosecuted for publishing obscenity. At the trial someone uncannily resembling the man in the faked photograph of the invented McCorkle leapt to his feet. At that moment the horrified Chubb was confronted by the malevolent being he had himself manufactured. Peter Carey wickedly and ruefully explores how the phantom poet taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker, pursuing Chubb from Melbourne to the seedy, sweaty, tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur.
Keywords: Fiction General My Life as a Fake Carey Peter
Price: $45.00