"... whatever the mind seizes upon with particular satisfaction is to be held in suspicion."
- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620.

Today i am finished reading Peter Carey: My Life As A Fake.
Today i also received my ID in the mail. My Australian Journalists Association media card, which lives around my neck. But of course the name on the card, by which i am known to my legion unfaithful readers, is not the same as the name on my passport...

The title of Carey's striated, organic ramble, 'My Life As A Fake,' tugs at a thread running the seam between fiction and non-fiction. For the title of the book suggests an autobiography. Autobiographies are regarded as non-fiction (in that simple dichotomy). Yeah, right. Show me an author whose autobiography is not a fictional account of their lives, and i'll show you a liar. This paradox is implicit in the title Carey has chosen for his - well, is masterpiece is too strong a word?

I swam in this beautiful work. It flows like a Malaysian mountain river. I caught my breath as i fathomed its murky depths, and emerged refreshed and stimulated. I just love novels that explore ideas. And I love this novel. Therefore…

My Life As A Fake is an incisive novel that explores ideas of authenticity and provenance, particularly how poetry (read: art + literature) is subject to these abstracted histories. But Carey’s exploratory surgery bleeds further into the authenticity and provenance of our lives and identities. Sexual identities are blurred, memories are deceptive, realities are subconsciously reconstructed, and always, lurking at the verge, is the spectre of insanity, the lurid mad entanglements of the Malayan forests, and noone is ever precisely who they are.

A cracking good yarn.

The story wells up from the Ern Malley affair, a literary hoax perpetrated in the 40s by two Australian poets who submitted faked ‘modernist’ poems to the Angry Penguin literary journal under the name “Ern Malley” (see http://www.ernmalley.com for a fascinating history). After accepting the poetry on face value, not only was the journal’s publisher pilloried by literary society, but was also convicted for publishing an obscene work. Years later, the hoaxed publisher said he still believed in Ern Malley, even though the poet was clearly an imaginary creation …

"The poet never maketh any circle about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes. He citeth not authorities of other histories, but even for his entry calleth the sweet Muses to inspire into him a good invention; in truth, not labouring to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be."
- Sir Phillip Sidney, 1595 “Apology for Poetry”.

Love and cigarettes, Art Director.

Recommended: Yes