Man Booker Prize Finalist National Book Award Finalist.
Two-time Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey’s latest feat of imagination is an irrepressible, audacious, and trenchantly funny novel set mostly in nineteenth-century America.
Olivier—an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville—is an aristocrat born just after the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English engraver. Their lives are joined when Olivier sets sail for the New World to save his neck from one more revolution and Parrot is sent with him as spy, protector, foe, and foil. With the story of their unlikely friendship, Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy with the dazzling inventiveness and richness of characterization, story, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer.
About The Author
"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.''
Industry Reviews
"As big and bold as [America] itself. . . . Carey at his finest. . . . He is a sheer magician with language." --The Miami Herald
"A brass-band burlesque of literature and history. . . .Provokes a reader's delighted applause. . . . Matchlessly robust." -The New York Times Book Review
"Outrageous and witty. . . .Another feat of acrobatic ventriloquism, joining Carey's masterpieces, Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang." -The Washington Post
"Gorgeously entertaining and moving. . . . This is a novel of fierce attachments, charting the proximity of beauty and terror in the human soul." --O, The Oprah Magazine
"Delicious. . . .A comic historical picaresque. . . .[This] book has an eighteenth-century robustness, a nineteenth-century lexicon, and a modern liberality." -James Wood, The New Yorker
"Re-imagines Alexis de Tocqueville's American journey with a verve that is nothing short of captivating. . . . A rollicking debate about America and its opportunities, its society and class distinctions." --The Denver Post
"Carey is as various, often as brilliant, and always as irreverent as they come." -The Boston Globe
"An exuberant, entertaining, incisive novel, full of attitude and incident." --Dallas Morning News
"Amusing and wise and graceful to a degree that we almost don't deserve." --Salon
"An energetically intelligent novel. . . . It bristles like a hedgehog with all of Carey's spiky ideas. . . . There's enough to snag your imagination on, and to spare." --The Christian Science Monitor
"Carey braids his story carefully, lovingly. . . .At its heart, Parrot and Olivier in America is a western; the simplest story in history, sculpted down to a twinkle in a philosopher's eye: Man's search for freedom." -Los Angeles Times
"Parrot and Olivier [is]. . . . Peter Carey's celebration of his marvelous discovery of how to write about--this time around--our own past." --San Francisco Chronicle
"A dazzling, entertaining novel. . . . The language is vivid, forceful and poetic." --The Guardian (London)
"Parrot offers Carey an excellent occasion to create swaggering 19th century brogue--and a new vantage to explore the transformative power of America." --Chicago Tribune
"Peter Carey is one of today's best writers of literary historical fiction. . . . The novel is full of lush detail, period lingo, and plenty of Dickensian coincidence and excitement." --The Charlotte Observer
"Extraordinarily allusive and joyously inventive. The numerous themes are spiced with his gutsy carnality. . . . A great deal of pleasure." --The Daily Telegraph (London)
"Cranks its energy, like Don Quixote, out of the friction between two antipodal characters. . . . Hums with comic adventure." --New York Magazine
"A comic, well-observed and meticulously crafted narrative. . . . Carey deftly and humorously brings debate into the narrative but seamlessly and organically within an immersive depiction of life 180 years ago." --Buffalo News
"One assumes it was no simple thing for Peter Carey to give birth to this masterful, sprawling epic. But oh, the reader is so pleased that the effort succeeded." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Even fuller than its predecessors of allusion, contrast, and comic contradiction. . . . It demands and repays repeated reading." --The Times Literary Supplement (London)
"Exquisitely written. . . . It's a surprising, stimulating, sad, and side-splitting deconstruction of social class, no less 'real' because it springs from Carey's imagination." --Tulsa World
"Elegant prose conveys the newness of America. . . . As usual with Carey, echoes of Dickens resound." --Bloomberg News
"Smart, charming and original. . . . [Carey] finds comedy in unexpected places." --NPR.org
