My Life as a Fake

Yaratan kim, yaratılan kimdir? Ne edebiyattır, ne değildir? Gerçek nedir, sahte nedir? Genellikle bunlara verecek cevaplarımız var gibidir. Ya tüm bunların birbirine karıştığı, cevapların öyle kolayca verilemediği durumlar, zamanlar yok mudur? Peter Carey işte o gölgeli, hem de koyu gölgeli alanlarda, yaratılanın yaratanı yarattığı o tekinsiz kıyılarda, gerçek ile sahte, edebiyat ile edebiyat olmayan arasındaki gelgitlerde keyifle dolaşıp okuru da o edebiyat adasının her koyunda maceralı bir geziye çıkarıyor. Edebiyat âleminde her daim sahte imzalarla gerçek yapıtlar üretilmiş, camianın direkleri sallanmaya çalışılmış, edebiyat adına korsan gösteriler düzenlenmiştir. İki Booker show more ödüllü Peter Carey de Avustralya'da 1943'te yaşanan Ern Malley Hilesi'nden esinlenerek ve onun temel olay örgüsünü ve şiirlerini kullanarak yarattığı Bob McCorkle Hilesi ile okurunu edebiyat ve edebiyat âlemi üzerine düşündürüyor. Ayrıca yazar, “Zavallıyı seyrettim, yarattığım hilkat garibesini. Yatağın perdesini kaldırdı ve gözlerini, eğer onlara göz denebilirse, üzerime mıhladı” diyen Mary Shelley'e bir selam da çakıyor. Ancak bu kez yaratığın adı Frankenstein değil, Bob McCorkle ya da Cristopher Chubb. Baktığınız yere göre değişir! Bir editör, iki şair Malezya'da Rilke vasıtasıyla milyonda bir gerçekleşebilecek bir karşılaşma yaşarsa ve onları bir araya getiren iyi şiir tutkusu ve arayışı olursa ortaya ne çıkar? Elbette şiir gibi bir roman. Her kafiyesi, her cinası iyi düşünülmüş, dokusu sıkı örülmüş, zekice olduğu kadar eğlenceli, eğlenceli olduğu kadar entelektüel bir eser. show less

London literary magazine editor Sarah agrees to accompany an old family friend, author John Slater, on a trip to Malaysia, where she quite accidentally meets Christopher Chubb - an Australian poet living in shamed exile after a scandal in which he created a hoax poet whose works were published in a high-profile publication. While the trick doesn't seem like that much of an issue in and of itself, the poems were later the subject of court case in which the editor was tried for obscenity and ultimately died in questionable circumstances. But stranger yet is the arrival on the trial scene of a man who claims to be the hoax poet - fitting every description of the imaginary personage. Chubb insists that Sarah must hear the full story and so show more unfolds a tale that spans years and countries, involving all kinds of turmoil, including kidnappings and murder.

This book was inspired in part by the real-life story of Ern Malley, a literary hoax whose creation resulted in a court case. But Carey then diverges from the story by introducing elements of magical realism, most notably the character of Bob McCorkle, the apparently turned-to-real-life fruition of Chubb's creative joke. The storytelling is deceptively simple, appearing to be simply the earnest narration of Sarah but then turning into stories within stories as she hears from Chubb and then learns alternate perspectives from Slater, Chubb's daughter Tina, and Tina's caregiver Mrs. Linn, with the plot unfolding layer after layer. In this way, Carey plays not only with literary conventions but also with themes related to the nature of reality, the reliability of memory, and the elements that go into perception. Some things are deliberately (and I think well so) left vague, so that the reader must decide for him or herself exactly what has transpired and which story to believe - or which parts from each story are to be believed.

The version I had was an audiobook narrated by Susan Lyons, who did an excellent job of conveying a number of emotions and stories passionately while also doing a fantastic job of speaking with the many accents required by the cast of characters presented. I highly recommend this book for a relatively short read that will leave you with plenty of food for thought on a variety of topics. show less

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 show more 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.

2009
http://www.librarything.com/topic/68641#1453007 show less

Australian talespinner Carey wins points with this affecting and ingenious potboiler about a literary feud gone sour, set in a sinister southeast Asian backwater. These days, of course, it's hard to believe that a hoax concerning poets and their publication in literary journals would merit anything more than a yawn, let alone a career-ending, suicide-inducing succès de scandale; yet such is the bygone literary world that Carey invokes, with a combination of pathos and glamour. The narrative drags a little in the second half, but remains on the whole highly entertaining.

While other reviewers consider this book confusing, I disagree and find it masterful. There are some shifting dialogues, but with one of the character's speech always typically (linguistically) marked, the careful reader should not lose track. An absolutely great read, with a great deal of humour and quite a pinch of horror.

The story is framed by the hunt and wish of a young female editor, Sarah, to discover a great, unknown poet and make a scoop. She stumbles upon Chubb who leads the miserable life of an absolute loser in Kuala Lumpur. Despite her travel companion's attempts to save her from herself and Chubb, whom he seems to know all about, Sarah is sure she's onto her great discovery. Chubb carefully entices her to listen to his show more life story, holding the supposedly great works out as bait.

Chubb is an outcast. In his youth he wrote a pastiche of some poetry of a friend, attributing / publishing those poems under the pseudonym Bob McCorkle. This McCorkle, shows up in flesh and blood, claiming to be the author and starts haunting and causing havoc in Chubb's life. McCorkle kidnaps Chubb's daughter and disappears to southeast Asia, where Chubb eventually tracks him down, and manages to liberate his child, who is completely estranged from him. When Sarah meets Chubb, many years later, Chubb is revered by his wife and daughter, who guard his works like guardian angels.

The novel has stark overtones, reminding us of Conrad's Asian and African novels and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. McCorkle is like an evil genii, called up or into existence by Chubb. Originally, Chubb created McCorkle, or so he thought, and tracking down his malicious creation reverberates the hunt for the monster of Frankenstein.

There are several other, remaining strands. The role of Sarah's travel companion is not very clear. He draws her attention to Chubb, apparently casually, but fully and knowingly of who Chubb is. He acts a bit like Sarah's mentor. The novel extensively explores issues of authorship and copyrights, and the moral rights attached to that.

Throughout the book, Chubb is put forward as an utterly repulsive figure. Repeatedly, we are confronted with his legs, covered with pustules and boils, his miserable life style, his run-down clothes and even his deteriorated English. Nobody wants to have anything to do with him, except for the deluded, misguided, his wife (apparently), his daughter (supposedly) and desperate Sarah. show less

In 1943 two conservative classicists set out to expose the absurdity of modernist poetry. Both James McAuley and Harold Stewart were classical trained poets, who didn’t think much about modernism; it didn’t rhyme, didn’t make sense and it just didn’t look right, it was fake poetry. If an everyman can abandon technique and rhythm and create poetry, what was the point of high art? They created this everyman, Ern Malley and submitted poetry under this name to the literary magazine Angry Penguins. The Ern Malley hoax has become one of the biggest literary scandals in Australian history. While the hoax crippled modernist poetry within Australia, ultimately this parody backfired on McAuley and Stewart. The poetry, which was written in show more a day and full of word plays and puns became a sensation in the 1970’s. Their attempt to parody modern poetry and create something fake turned into something real, beyond their control and is now celebrated as fine examples of surrealist poetry.

Peter Carey’s My Life is a Fake explores the idea of fakery while paying homage to the Ern Malley hoax. Knowledge of this hoax is the backbone of this post-modernist novel, so much so that he covers his thoughts on it in the back of the book. Thinking about this novel I get the idea that this is a book that demands the reader to think about the purpose of reading. While this is considered contemporary fiction, it really demands a lot from the read and it wants to address a number of literary issues. Editor for Monthly Review Sarah Wode-Douglass, while traveling to Kuala Lumpur, encounters the perpetrator of the hoax after many years. The novel goes on to explore the literate mystery of forgeries but I won’t go into too much detail, it is quite a ride.

“I still believe in Ern Malley. (…) For me Ern Malley embodies the true sorrow and pathos of our time. One had felt that somewhere in the streets of every city was an Ern Malley (…) a living person, alone, outside literary cliques, outside print, dying, outside humanity but of it. (…) As I imagined him Ern Malley had something of the soft staring brilliance of Franz Kafka; something of Rilke’s anguished solitude; something of Wilfred Owen’s angry fatalism. And I believe he really walked down Princess Street somewhere in Melbourne. (…) I can still close my eyes and conjure up such a person in our streets. A young person. A person without the protection of the world that comes from living in it. A man outside.” Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins.

While this book is told in a first person narrative, from the perspective of Sarah, as a reader I wrestled with the perspective. The novel explored the life of Sarah, her traveling partner John Slater who she describes as an unapologetically narcissist. Also we learn about Christopher Chubb and his monster, the non-existent Bob McCorkle. My mind wrested with questions like, whose life was I reading about? Whose words am I reading? Whose mythology do I accept? Personally I think these are the questions Carey wants us to ask, also I have to wonder what type of fakery are we talking about in the title?

Now I called the fictional poet Bob McCorkle a monster because this novel is influenced by a lot of literature but the most obvious is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like McAuley and Stewart’s hoax, Bob McCorkle was a monster in the eyes of its creator and takes on a life of its own. There are also references to Paradise Lost (which can be connected to Frankenstein) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. An understanding of Greek mythology is helpful as well, especially Orpheus. This is a tricky book to read, and it took me a while to get the hang of it. Once I got into the rhythm of the novel, I think understanding and progress was a lot easier, though I do think a better understanding of literature would be helpful.

My Life as a Fake explores the power of creation, sometimes it just takes a life on its own with no way of stopping it. We must wrestle with the question of whether the man claiming to be Bob McCorkle is a fanatic; someone with an identity delusion, a hoaxer’s hoaxer, an accident, or an illusion called into being by its creator. As My Life as a Fake is an Australian novel, I can’t help but wonder if this is exploring the idea that Australia doesn’t produce Art, rather parodies and fakeries. The misconception that Australian artist must trade in masquerades to get noticed, a slightly old point of view but one that might have been still relevant in the time of the hoax.

I had to read this book for a university course so I also had to think about post-colonialism (a common theme in the subject). I’m not sure how this works as a post-colonial novel but I have to ask, as a colonized nation is this book viewing Australia as Frankenstein’s monster. Whose country are we in? Why does it matter? Are we the bastard spawn of a powerful creator (England)? Are we just fakes in the eyes of Europeans? Did we start off as fakes that took on a life of its own? Not really important questions for the book but interesting enough to share in this review.

Given that Frankenstein heavily influences My Life as a Fake, does this make this a modern gothic novel? They do invoke similar themes, interesting that this novel is meant to be popular fiction and yet it still explores high art in a complex, post modern way. Makes me wonder just how successful this novel was for Peter Carey. For me, while it was a difficult read, I found pleasure in studying this book, makes me want to read all of Carey’s books, maybe I’ll try The True History of the Ned Kelly Gang next.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2014/02/16/my-life-as-a-fake-by-peter-carey/ show less

What do you do when you find your life has been built on misperceptions, misperceptions as grand as the reason and means behind your mother’s death? How do you react when you find out the hoax you’ve been chasing turns out to be a hoax of a hoax? These are just some of the revelations that Sarah Wode-Douglass, one of the main characters of this novel, finds in her search.

Once again, Carey gives us a heavily Far Eastern influenced blend of eccentric and complicated characters, reminiscent of Illywacker. While most of the action in My Life as a Fake takes place in Malaysia, the cast of characters is drawn from England, Malaysia, Australia, authors and poets from other lands and the minds of the characters in this book.

Carey takes show more liberties with, according to the Author’s Notes, a real literary hoax from the mid 1940’s. In Carey’s version of the story, the hoax becomes a parable of how we are shaped by how we perceive our own memories. None of the characters we are introduced to are quite what they seem to be and even the patently invented characters take on a life of their own because of the way people believe in them. In the end, you are left questioning what is real and what is not, very similar to the questions left after Martel’s Life of Pi. Just remember, this is a story . . . isn’t it?

After reading My Life as a Fake, I can’t help but wonder why Peter Carey is not better known in America. His writing is just plain brilliant. As with Illywacker, Carey writes very graphically. I had no trouble envisioning the people or settings described in the book. The liberal use of Malay dialect in the narrative pulled me even further into the story. The scenes became so vivid, I began to cast people for a movie in my head while reading. One of the few detracting features is Carey did not use quotes to separate dialog from exposition. Then again, the story deals with poetic license and the inability to separate reality from fantasy, so the physical layout of the book mirrors the story as well. Very fitting.

If you like the division between fantasy and reality clearly defined, this book may give you trouble. If you like realistic characters with as many levels of interpretation as real people, you will enjoy this work. If nothing else, read this for the exotic locale and quirky people you will meet. While not casual escapism, this novel is certainly a break from reality. show less