Recensione:
“In addition to historical, behavioral, and playful storytelling dimensions, there is an emphatically physical dimension of conflict to [Carey’s] work, conveyed not through words but in between them. The air in his novels can feel charged and changeable, thinning to ghostliness or thickening to sluggishness, as before a storm. Carey’s latest novel operates on all these levels, and a couple of new ones . . . . [Hugh’s] voice is studded with funny malapropisms, Joyce-inflected scat, and a low-grade hysteria that Carey humorously conveys . . . The most skillful effect in Theft is Carey’s complex weaving of [the brothers’] harsh emotional legacy into the grown men’s thoughts, behavior, and spasmodic jokes . . . On the surface Carey’s [prose] pulls us forward in an atmosphere of antic noir. But the book turns out to be nearly as dense with themes, subplots, and embedded details as a more capacious and ambitious work like Oscar and Lucinda . . . Impressive.”
–Sarah Kerr, New York Review of Books
“[A] brilliant fictional world . . . Opening a Peter Carey novel is a little like being seduced . . . There is never a pause or moment of hesitation in his writing, immediately absorbing you within his fictional constructs by the power of his narrative voices . . . This is dizzyingly poetic prose . . . [Theft] is a refreshing change from the dreary domesticity and realism of contemporary fiction . . . If you haven’t already, you might want to introduce yourself to Peter Carey. Theft is a virtuoso inauguration, not to mention a great first date.”
–Sharon Dilworth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“I can’t not read a book by Peter Carey . . . Carey is best known for his (wonderful) historical novels, but he’s in his glorious element when writing about the contemporary world, too . . . He’s a consummate storyteller with a wicked eye and a tremendous ventriloquist’s gift.”
–Claire Messud, The Atlantic Monthly
“Peter Carey’s funny, rumbustious new novel takes on the contemporary art world with the same scathing wit that characterized Tom Wolfe’s non-fiction evisceration of the lost, nihilistic post-1950s art scene in The Painted Word . . . Written with terrific verbal energy and a snide, lashing sense of humour, Theft is a marvellous caper, a wicked little love story and a fine mockery of an industry that probably deserves it.”
–The Economist
“Superbly rendered . . . Hugh’s voice enthralls . . . Style when projected by Carey’s characters is an existential muzzle-flash, alerting us to the shooter behind the light and noise . . . Theft is a work of art that successfully reflects upon the conditions in which art is created, [with a] pulsating, inimitably authentic, core.”
–Siddartha Deb, Telegraph
“The strength of Theft lies in its narrative voice and in Carey’s delight in his subject. The two-time Booker winner is clearly enjoying himself.”
–Yvonne Zipp, Christian Science Monitor
“At once a love story, a tragedy, a comedy, a tragicomedy, and an artist’s journey . . . Carey manages to maintain a haunting balance . . . [He] certainly lives up to his reputation as a versatile post-colonial literary voice in his virtuosity and conscientiousness in conjuring worlds spanning Australia, Japan, and America . . . At the heart of Carey’s achievement is the profundity of isolation–the sacred, inviolable inscrutability of an individual’s subjectivity.”
–Amy Wong, Harvard Book Review
“Brilliant Peter Carey has written another marvelous novel . . . A hilarious romp, [a] mad caper of a story . . . Virtuoso . . . Theft is witty, urbane, funny and profound down to its last searing line.”
–Joan Mellen, Baltimore Sun
“[A] very funny new novel [with an] ingeniously worked-out art-fraud plot . . . Theft is the kind of novel only an abundantly gifted artist, and one serious about his craft, could produce. Carey proves once again that he’s about as good a novelist as we’ve got today.”
–Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News
“Complex, tense and captivating . . . An inventive thriller, [a] continent-jumping caper . . . Its alternating narrators, Michael and Hugh, are easily two of Carey’s most vibrant and memorable characters . . . Hilarious, pitch-perfect . . . A complete, compelling and satisfying tale, Theft is made doubly rewarding by [its] fraternal narrators, who lend the novel a stunning degree of humanity and authenticity.”
–Thomas Haley, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“[Carey is a] brilliantly inventive writer . . . Hugh’s is the yawping, anguished voice of the id, a primal bundle of sensation, clarity and need. Carey’s genius speaks through Hugh . . . [Theft] is an authentic love story about two brothers who can’t stand themselves, and can’t live without each other.”
–Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times
“Peter Carey is an astonishing novelist . . . The plot of Theft is well-crafted and engaging, but the real strength of the novel is in its characterizations . . . It’s Carey’s genius that these two cranky misfits rule the day . . . A wild and satisfying ride.”
–Mary J. Elkins, Rocky Mountain News
“Uproarious . . . Theft is brilliantly constructed, and in Butcher and Hugh, Carey creates two narrators the reader cannot help but care about. No aspect of the art world and the rarified atmosphere of its collectors escapes Carey’s rapier wit, and the humor is non-stop . . . Carey has outdone himself with this novel, one of his best–a comic masterpiece.”
–Mary Whipple, MostlyFiction.com
“Remarkable . . . Carey likes these intricate, spangly plots, with their outrageous truancies from verisimilitude and their lizard-like velocity; he is one of the most fantastical storytellers in the language, and yet the stories are not unreal, and this is partly why readers can never decide who he is like: is it Dickens, or Joyce, or Kafka, or Faulkner, or Nabokov, or García Márquez, or Rushdie? Two of the realisms that ground these dense fantasies are Carey’s ability to animate even minor characters with a flick of novelistic attention, and his great interest in the warped reality of spoken language. One of the great familiar pleasures of his new novel is the way the language recklessly mixes different registers into a vivid democracy, now high and now low, but always interestingly rich . . . The great enricher of the novel is its second narrator, Hugh Boone[,] a Faulknerian monologist, who speaks a barbarous, spoiled poetry, sometimes weirdly funny and slangy and sometimes manically vatic and biblical, with frequent crescendos into capital letters . . . His riffs are moving, twisted, and sometimes sublime.”
–James Wood, London Review of Books
“Revelatory, inspired . . . A screwball noir tale . . . Carey is a loon from down under, a mad max who drives language and plot straight through the great barrier reef of the commonplace . . . Oftentimes writers known for their derring-do with language are better admired than read . . . Carey in contrast wants his readers to join him in a good laugh right now . . . Carey’s language is so lively, so unaffected that the big ideas here slip in under cover of a joke. In this divine comedy of a novel, Carey gives his readers a rollicking lark of a story as well as a sense of eternity in a grain of sand.”
–Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air/NPR
“Meticulously convincing . . . Certainly the most intricately plotted and the most sheerly entertaining novel about a painter I’ve ever read . . . You have to read the book to savour all the sheer wickedness and cut-throat cunning of the international modern art world and the final pages are exquisitely startling . . . I haven’t read such authoritative writing on art forgery and art fraud since William Gaddis’s masterpiece, The Recognitions. Nor have I read so affecting an account of the life of two brothers, one of whom is deemed by the rest of the world to be soft in the head, since Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala . . . Carey’s jaundiced eye on the contemporary art scene is wonderfully and destructively satirical and the humour robust and farcical but never crude. It would be entirely unsurprising if Carey becomes the first ever triple Booker, or Man-Booker, winner.”
–Tom Rosenthal, Independent on Sunday
“The brilliantly restless [Carey] has rebelled, grown in confidence, and rebelled again . . . Radical independence is profoundly present in this novel . . . As a love story, Theft is remarkably disabused . . . The ending is wonderfully executed.”
–Ruth Scurr, Times Literary Supplement
“In a word, superb . . . Carey is a master of voice, and he puts his expertise to good use again in his latest book . . . He is absolutely breathtaking when writing in Hugh’s changeable, lyrical and often hilarious voice . . . It’s not just the story, which is a roller coaster, or the characters, each of whom is so memorable, but the sheer physicality of Carey’s writing that makes Theft so good. Read it. You won’t be disappointed.”
–Nancy Connors, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Marvellously enjoyable, wonderful . . . [Carey] has once more written the real thing. [Hugh’s] language is extraordinary . . . The writing is full of sumptuous painterly effects . . . There is a flow of comic incident as the story withholds what it shows and winds around itself u...
L'autore:
A two-time Booker Prize-winner and two-time recipient of the Commonwealth Prize, Peter Carey is the author of eight novels, a collection of short stories, and two books of non-fiction. Born in Australia, he now lives in New York City.
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