Australia & Oceania - Travel, General & Miscellaneous Biography, Travel - Cities of the World

30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account

Name: 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account
Author: Peter Carey
ISBN: 9781608192380

by Peter Carey

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Overview

After living abroad for years, novelist Peter Carey returns home to Sydney and attempts to capture its character with the help of his old friends, drawing the reader into a wild and wonderful journey of discovery and rediscovery as bracing as the southerly buster that sometimes batters Sydney's shores. Famous sights such as Bondi Beach, the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and the Blue Mountains all take on a strange new intensity when exposed to the penetrating gaze of the author and his friends.

About the Author, Peter Carey

Peter Carey received the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda and again for True History of the Kelly Gang. His other awards include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. His most recent novel His Illegal Self was published in 2008. Born in Australia in 1943, he now lives in New York, where he is the director of the Hunter College MFA program in creative writing.

Biography

"My fictional project has always been the invention or discovery of my own country," the prizewinning Australian author Peter Carey has said. This postcolonial undertaking has sometimes led Carey to wrestle with the great works of English literature: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) draws on Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, while in Jack Maggs (1997), a version of Dickens's Great Expectations, is told from the perspective of the convict who returns to England from Australia.

But although Carey went to what he calls "a particularly posh" Australian boarding school, he claims he didn't discover literature until he was out of school. He studied chemistry at Monash University for just a year before leaving to work in advertising. There, surrounded by readers and would-be writers, he discovered the great literature of the 20th century, including authors like Joyce, Faulkner and Beckett. "To read Faulkner for the first time was for me like discovering another planet," Carey said in an interview with The Guardian. "The pleasure of that language, the politics of giving voice to the voiceless."

Publishers rejected Carey's first three novels, so he began writing short stories. These, he later said, "felt like the first authentic things I had done." He was still working for an advertising agency when his first collection of short stories appeared in 1973, and he kept the part-time job after moving to an "alternative community" in Queensland. His first published novel, Bliss (1981), won a prestigious Australian literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. The book is about an advertising executive who has a near-death experience and ends up living in a rural commune.

Carey's later novels ranged farther outside the bounds of his own experience, but he continued to develop his concern with Australian identity. 1988's Oscar and Lucinda, which tells the story of a colonial Australian heiress and her ill-fated love for an English clergyman, won the Booker Prize and helped establish Carey as one of the literary heavyweights of his generation. He won another Booker Prize for True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), the story of a notorious 19th-century outlaw whose legacy still shapes Australia's consciousness.

Though Carey now lives and teaches in New York City, his home country and its past still possess his imagination. ''History,'' he writes, ''is like a bloodstain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we paint over it.''

Good To Know

Peter Carey and J. M. Coetzee are the only two-time Booker Prize winners to date.

Carey caused a stir in the British press when he declined an invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II. The royal invitation is extended to all winners of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, which Carey received in 1998 for Jack Maggs. He did meet the Queen after he won the award a second time, for True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001.

Fans of Carey's work know that in 1997, Oscar and Lucinda was made into a critically acclaimed movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett. But they may not know that Carey wrote the screenplay for the critically panned Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World (1991) as well as the screenplay adaptation of his own novel, Bliss (1991).

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

When Australian novelist Peter Carey left Sydney in the early '80s, he was a relatively unknown novelist. When he returned to the city 17 years later, he was a Booker Prize winner, a New York resident, and a somewhat controversial figure in the land of his birth. His exhilarating and offbeat tour of his homeland's cultural capital engages Sydney rather than merely describing it. By turns raucous and introspective, 30 Days in Sydney presents the bustling hive as a volatile fusion of the four primal elements. Mix at your own pleasure.

Publishers Weekly

In the second volume of Bloomsbury's The Writer and the City series, Carey (Oscar and Lucinda), an Australian native, returns to Sydney after 17 years. Armed with a battery-powered tape recorder, he badgers old friends including a Vietnam vet, a lawyer and an architect to contribute stories that might define Sydney. "A metropolis is, by definition, inexhaustible, and by the time I departed, thirty days later, Sydney was as unknowable to me as it had been on that clear April morning when I arrived," Carey concludes. He deftly intertwines dry facts about climate, geography and history with poetic stream of consciousness. The result is a desultory, impressionistic love letter to the city, structured loosely around earth, air, fire and water (one friend protected his home from bush fires; another barely survived the "murderous seas of the 1998 Sydney-Hobart race" which sank six yachts and killed five men). The acclaimed Booker Prize winner lets his characters direct the story, stepping in briefly to explain ("A rissole, in case you are from across the sea, is a kind of hamburger patty, but it is also an arsehole and also an RSL [Returned Services League]") and describe ("On Bondi I feel the space everywhere, not just in the luxury of beach and light but in that imagined house two streets back where I will not have to throw a book away to make room for each new one"). Carey touches lightly but firmly on Sydney's own brand of white guilt and patriotism, as well as its culture and landmarks. While other travelogues may provide more information, this effort will leave more lasting impressions. (Sept. 6) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This second entry in Bloomsbury's promising "The Writer and the City" series (following Edmund White's The Fl neur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris) is anything but a typical tourist guide. In fact, its subtitle best explains the author's goal: to write "a wildly distorted account." This intimate look at Sydney, written by a native who visited Australia during the Olympics in 2000 after a 17-year absence, has little practical travel advice to offer but loads of details of the many days the author spent wandering in a stupor from too much surfing during the day and too much partying at night. This presentation of Sydney as seen through the eyes of an insider rather than a tourist gives the book its undeniable charm, but it is also its weakness. Those who want to dig deep into the Aussie psyche will be richly rewarded, but those looking for advice on whether to take a tour of the Blue Mountains or cuddle a koala at a wildlife park may be disappointed. Carey is an award-winning novelist whose most recent work is True History of the Kelly Gang. Recommended for medium and large public libraries. Joseph L. Carlson, Lompoc P.L., CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Booker-winning novelist Carey (The True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001, etc.) turns in a "distorted" tour of Sydney during last year's Olympic Games. Though this "Writer and the City" series promises musings from well-regarded writers on "the city they know best," Carey is originally from Melbourne, and didn't live in that "vulgar crooked convict town" of Sydney until he was almost 40-and most of the time since, he has lived as a resident alien in New York. With the idiosyncratic notion of describing Sydney in terms of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, Carey spends his 30 days with old cronies, architects and artists for the most part, all grown older, their wildness mostly behind them. His friends tell good stories, and through them Carey offers bits and pieces of the essence of Sydney: a little-known eccentric who painted "Eternity" in hundreds of unlikely places; sailors reliving the disastrous Sydney-to-Hobart race of 1998; how to catch a kingfish; and most appealingly, the story of Sheridan, an ex-hippie soap-opera writer who has holed himself up in a cave in the austere Blue Mountains to write a novel. (The Olympics are mostly ignored, regarded mainly as an intrusion.) Carey weaves in the history of Sydney's founding: the unsuitability of the land for farming; the absence of lime (needed to make mortar for laying bricks); the abuse of aborigines by the convict settlers, who were themselves abused. That convict history still informs the Australian character, Carey says, an observation commonly made. Carey's style is a pleasure, but his point is a bit hard to make out, unless one wants to take his effort as a long prose poem-an approach to travel-writing not likely to find manyreaders. Not so much "wildly distorted," it turns out, as disjointed and unfocused.