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Peter Carey has wholly reimagined the world in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. It is vaguely futuristic, underlain with the sediment of a recently ruined past, just post-colonial, culturally monolithic, and although everything seems familiar, nothing is quite recognizable. Our guide here is Tristan Smith himself: a freak of nature, a 'cracked and mended pot' of flesh that hides a 'normal' human being. Tristan is everything one could ask for in a companion and interpretive center of attention - one way or another - wherever he goes, he is sharp-eyed and quick-witted, unsentimental and unforgiving: the perfect witness to the fact and extraordinary effect of his own 'monstrosity.'. Tristan takes us barrelling through his life and times (learning to be invisible and viable, coming of age, losing his mother, searching for his father, transforming himself from something people are afraid even to imagine into something already sanctioned for their imaginations), down a riotously populated, circuitous path that leads, finally, to the Sirkus: the newest entertainment opiate, the inspiration of slavish devotion in audiences, and, perhaps, the source of Tristan's ultimate transformation. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is the picaresque made post-modern, a tragicomedy in constant, convulsive motion. It is Peter Carey's most audacious and powerful novel yet.
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Review:
"Irresistible...intimate and theatrical...supple and surprising.... We're in the hands of a master storyteller." --Carol Shields, author of The Stone Diaries "Carey has vaulted to the top ranks of writers in the English-speaking world.... Tristan has an appeal that transcends geography." --Newsday "Carey's always magical, absolutely lovable narrative voice makes The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith an important contribution to contemporary fiction.... No matter what he decides to write or how he decides to write it, it's a priviledge to read him." --Carolyn See, Washington Post Book World "Savage and hilarious...dazzling." --The New York Review of Books
Book Description:
The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is an inventive romp by Peter Carey, the Booker Prize-winning author of Amnesia, Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang.
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- PublisherVintage Books
- Publication date1996
- ISBN 10 0679760369
- ISBN 13 9780679760368
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages432
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The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (Paperback)
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. From a writer whom Thomas Keneally calls "one of the great figures on the cusp of the millennium" comes a novel that conjures an entire world that suggests our own, but tilted on its axisa world whose most powerful country, Voorstand, dominates its neighbors with ruthless espionage and its mesmerizing but soul-destroying Sirkus.Into that world comes Tristan Smith, a malformed, heroically willful, and unforgivingly observant child. Tristan's life includes adventure and loss, political intrigue, and a bizarre stardom in the Voorstand Sirkus, where animals talk and human performers die real deaths. The result is a visionary picaresque, staggering in its inventions, spellbinding in its suspense, and unabashedly moving. The Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and The Tax Inspector now gives readers a hero, the malformed but ferociously wilful Tristan Smith, who becomes the object of the world's byzantine political intrigues, even as he attains stardom in a bizarre Sirkus that is part passion play and part Mortal Kombat. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780679760368
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The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith: A Novel
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