Quick to laughter, he is happy to jab at his critics. In conversation Carey is confident, funny, pugnacious and rollicking good company, but not meek. The unassuming assessment of his influence is not entirely the result of modesty. If you want a novelist with power, then Peter Carey is your man. Over the course of a career that dates back three decades, Carey has won every Australian literary award going and is regularly mentioned in dispatches as a future Nobel laureate. Twice a winner of the Man Booker Prize, for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang, the 71-year-old is guaranteed a global audience every time he releases a new work – in this case, his 13th novel, Amnesia. This final statement might sound a little strange being spoken by the Australian novelist Peter Carey. When you publish, you never get the attention or have the influence that, in your grandiose dreams at four in the morning, you think you are going to have.” You really don’t have, and nor do you expect, much power. But in the end you are a taxi driver or small shopkeeper. That means you end up with the mentality of a taxi driver or small shopkeeper: ‘If you don’t like it, get out of my shop.’ You feel that giddy sense of power. Publishers tend to let you do what you want. People who write for the movies are continually going to meetings where 16-year-olds tell them what to do. “I have never in my literary life felt blocked by anyone.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |