Peter carey bliss review5/13/2023 Most of the brief pieces in his first book, The Fat Man in History (published 40 years ago), showed an innovative flair that startled their readers. Often these disruptive moments transform not only characters and situations but also the genre of the story itself: we find ourselves reading something quite different in kind from what we’d thought it was.Īlthough Carey has been regarded for a long time now as a novelist, he made his name as a boldly experimental writer of short stories. Looked at again after an interval of many years, they’re a reminder that sudden structural changes have always been a feature of his stories. I begin here with two examples of Peter Carey’s early fiction, ‘Crabs’ and Illywhacker. So in an effort to resist the buzz of mere topicality, I’ll be posting comments occasionally on books (or parts of books) first encountered some while back that now seem worth revisiting. ‘What do you think of XX’s new novel?’ ‘Uh…I haven’t read her previous one yet.’ We droop with ennui, which tends to efface our memory of things we read a few years ago – though they may have more lasting value than The Latest Thing. None of us manages to keep up with the sheer quantity of publications appearing month after month. It’s a natural focus of review pages, bookshop displays, festival programs. In the world of reading, The Latest Thing usually dominates our attention.
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