Peter Carey, Emma Donoghue Up For Booker Prize

Australian writer Peter Carey moved closer to a literary hat trick Tuesday, Sep 7 when he was named a finalist for fiction's prestigious Booker Prize, an award he has already won twice.

Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America — a U.S. odyssey inspired by philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville — is one of six contenders for the 50,000-pound ($77,000) prize, which guarantees a glut of media attention and a big boost in sales.

Carey took home Bookers in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. He would be the first writer to win the prize three times, but is considered a long shot.

The early favorite, according to bookmaker William Hill, is British writer Tom McCarthy, whose wildly experimental C — the story of a technology-obssessed 20th-century everyman — has drawn comparisons to James Joyce.

Full report here NPR


The shortlist
Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America
Emma Donoghue Room
Damon Galgut In a Strange Room
Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question
Andrea Levy The Long Song
Tom McCarthy C

The Empire's orphan children

As a touchingly emotional Rana Dasgupta rose to receive the Commonwealth Award for the Best Book, he joined a long list of distinguished winners, from Mordecai Richler and Rohinton Mistry to Peter Carey, Vikram Seth and Andrea Levy.

Dasgupta’s Solo, his second book and first novel, is a virtuoso performance, like so many Commonwealth Prize winners. Set in Bulgaria, it explores the painful consequences of the choices made by both nations and individuals. Ulrich is blind, living out his years in a city where all the stories have changed, after “the former villains were cast in bronze and put up in parks”. As his mind wanders through a real and sometimes imaginary past, his life seems like a settling, however unfair, of history’s accounts.

With Peter Carey, J M Coetzee, Thomas Keneally and Chimamanda Adichie on the regional shortlists at one point, it seemed that Solo would be the dark horse of the competition, despite its obvious merits — but the final list of regional winners didn’t include any of the big four, making Dasgupta and Michael Crummey the front-runners for the competition.

Full report here Business Standard

The birth of a democracy

A fictionalised, historical glimpse into the birth of American democracy cannot fail to intrigue, coming as it does at the end of a decade in which that many-headed beast has spurred violent debate from drawing-room to dhaba across the world. And Peter Carey’s deliciously funny, sly and — best of all — beautifully composed portrait of that New World as seen through the eyes of an alarmed but often sympathetic European nobleman provides myriad perspectives from which to assess how truly revolutionary — and grotesque — the first blotchy blueprints of modern democracy must have been. But the most surprising achievement of Parrot and Olivier in America is that it captures so accurately, and unselfconsciously, the contortions of the democratic conundrum as it exists today right here, in India.

Facts first: Parrot and Olivier recounts the adventures and slow-cooked friendship of Jack Larrit alias Parrot, and Olivier de Garmont, loosely based on the political philosopher Alexis de Toqueville. Both carry heavy, heaving pasts. Parrot is tragically separated from his father and his country, flung into the service of the decaying French aristocracy armed with little except a talent for mimicry and art; and Olivier de Garmont, scion of French nobility, is haunted by the horrors of a Revolution that spared his parents’ necks but grips his psyche as tightly as medicinal leeches do his flesh.

Full report here TOI Crest