AustLit

Hassall argues that 30 Days in Sydney is consistent both with Carey's 'career-long preoccupation with re-telling aspects of Australia's story' and 'with his practice of doing so via distortions which defamiliarize his subjects, thereby enabling his readers to see them free of those other distortions naturalized by habit and convention. What appears to begin as factual celebrity travel writing ... turns into a collection of stories, of fictions, of beuatiful lies which capture more searchingly than a merely factual travelogue the look, the feel, the history and the spirit of Sydney, that metonym for Australia' (331-332)

My Life as a Fake, despite the fact that it presents a departure in terms of setting and theme, still feels familiar, not least because, as Robert Macfarlane explains, there is a good deal of "epistemological blurriness" in the novel regarding notions of authorship and originality. In this respect, Macfarlane argues, "My Life as a Fake represents the climax of a conceit with which Carey has long been fascinated: that lies, hoaxes, and fakes are, at their most successful, deeply creative forms of expression." My Life as a Feake, the critic points out, thus not only sums up some of Carey's writerly preoccupations. Its literary-philosphical thesis - that "under careful scrutiny the apparent opposition between 'making' and 'faking' collapses into nea-identity, that fakery of some sort is a normative and necessary condition of literary creation, and that repetition is the first making and plagiarism the unoriginal sin" - is also at the heart of a "mini-tradition of recent anglophone fiction".' (Introduction to Fabulating Beauty xxxiii)

Most comprehensive bibliography of Peter Carey to date with over 1,300 items, including many international publications.