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Loading... My Life as a Fakeby Peter Carey
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  roadtomandalay | Aug 27, 2009 |  A lesson in storytelling. There is a good story here, and some things to think about, especially about poetry, but what really stood out for me was how dynamic the storytelling was. It was fun to read from the very first page. The inspiration of the story is a real hoax in poetry world of Australia during WWII, where an editor became enraptured with what turned out to be the fictional poet Ern Malley and his fictional life story. Carey's story calls into question the true value of poetry, and looks at the obsession to find a sort of pure poet, an outsider free of the modern prevailing poetry culture, but still a master. What I admire here is that we aren't told what to think. The story on the pages stays light. It's serves more like a jumping off point for pondering the nature of modern poetry and of humanity (and of truth vs. fiction). The implied questions are, perhaps, much deeper. I should also mention this includes an interesting look at Malaysia during and after WWII. (  ) dchaikin | Aug 21, 2009 | Yes, he is a tremendous storyteller, almost letter-perfect. I was thrown out of the narrative only once in the entire book, on p. 271, line 1, when the narrator tells us 'It had taken me years to realize that, for all his faults, John Slater was truly very kind,' because it seems in context that the narrator had only just thought of that. Carey drives a plot forward more deftly than any contemporary writer, and he reminds me, in a different register, of Maeve Binchy: by which I mean the book has the narrative drive that I would associate with more popular fiction. But what was the point of the three years of research he put into this book? Why build it so rich in cultural references? Why learn so much about Malaysia? Carey isn't Naipaul: he isn't writing to tell us about the Tamils in Malaysia. The book is about poets, their lives and ambitions, publishing, literary hoaxes, the rarity and nature of genius, and so forth: things that have nothing to do with the profusion of cultural details. Of course it's inevitable that a title like this will make readers think of the author. The book is 'fake' in the sense that Carey hides some of his thoughts about genius and its relation to sanity in a zoological garden of ethnographic details. But why doesn't he realize that the encyclopedic learning about Malaysia, worn so lightly in the unavoidable cliché, is not pertinent to his interests in poetry and publishing? Why does he think that a meditation of fame and literary lives needs to be presented as a detective story? It's that failure of imagination, not the failure of the ethnographic research (which is convincing) or the detective-story plot (perfectly competent) but the failure to understand and explore the disconnection between the two, that makes me think I will not read another of his books. (  )1  JimElkins | Jul 23, 2009 | This is a tale of a fake poet, or is he a fake? The confusion of this comes through in the writing, it is confused and rambling and reality and make believe weave around each other. ( )1 Tifi | Nov 30, 2008 | I highly recommend this book. I was already a fan of Peter Carey, but approach his books with trepidation as some of them just don't work. This though is one of his best, and ranks alongside Oscar and Lucinda, Illywhacker, Jack Maggs, True History of Kelly Gang - as a great Carey. The central themes are truth and ambition - and the tensions between the two. The themes are played out convincingly by believable ( although grotesque ) characters. (  ) MarkTheShark | Sep 21, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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| Book description |
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The novel opens as Sarah, the reluctant tourist and editor of The Modern Review, is dragged by a foppish poet-friend, John Slater, to Kuala Lumpur. Sarah is intent on biding her time in her hotel, but a chance encounter with a scabrous reader of Rilke soon transforms Sarah's plans and, ultimately, her life. The reader, the Australian poet Christopher Chubb, is the disgraced initiator of a great literary hoax--the faked poems of the non-existent Bob McCorkle. The McCorkle hoax was Chubb's attempt to bring down a rising poetry editor, David Weiss. When the hoax was exposed, Weiss was believed to have committed suicide. But, living in exile, Chubb has hidden a secret for decades: Bob McCorkle had seemingly materialized in human form, killing Weiss and destroying Chubb's life. Sarah is tantalized by a fragment of supposed McCorkle poetry that Chubb has shared with her. Whether it is a fake or the work of a madman, Sarah believes it is genius. Her obsession, however, drives her and Chubb to the precipice of self-destruction.
The primary story--Chubb's pursuit of McCorkle--lives in the fictional past, and the plot occasionally becomes muddled in the nest of narrators recalling conversations second or third hand. In playing out the McCorkle affair, Carey’s denouement comes too quickly. If Sarah is transformed, Carey doesn't reveal enough of her in the text. He is mesmerized, as is the reader, by Chubb's horrific tale.
With its small shortcomings, the novel offers a sophisticated interrogation of authorship and fakery and the power of art. Carey avoids simplifying the McCorkle mystery, leaving the reader to puzzle out McCorkle's bizarre incarnation. While My Life as a Fake is frequently entertaining, the atmospheric mystery occasionally glimpses the profound. --Patrick O'Kelley
(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:53:05 -0500)
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This story is retold many years later by Chubb to an English publisher in Kuala Lumpur. But is he executing yet another fake? He claims that his creation, Bob McCorkle, came to life and terrorised first the publisher and then his own creator, kidnapping his daughter and taking her deep into the jungles of South-East Asia. Allusions to Frankenstein are explicit, the novel even begins with a quotation from Mary Shelley, but I thought this became rather laboured and Carey needn't have worried about having so many points of contact with the earlier work.
The way the story was retold was in a mixture of reported and direct speech and this became pretty confusing at times. My main problem, though, was that the characters all became so unlikeable I simply didn't care what happened to them by about half way through. The focus of the book moved from being literary, and very post-modern, to actually being a human interest piece about this mysterious daughter. Call me heartless, but I found this less than satisfying. Many people have remarked that the ending felt like something of an anti-climax, and I too thought it felt rushed and fairly arbitrary.
The jungle scenes were reminiscent of Greene or Waugh but on the whole the satire on a satire rather failed in my eyes. Musings on the potential of genius, without much evidence that it ever actually existed. A grand idea, but a weak execution.