Tag: Peter Carey

‘American Dreams’ by Peter Carey

The best paper I took at University was by an academic named Ragnhild Eikli on the Theory of the Short Story. It took Joyce’s Dubliners as a theoretical prayerbook for understanding the form, and I think that holds up: Eikli was able to show that in each of Joyce’s stories there is a moment of epiphany and a gesture towards a much larger unnatural tension.

Eikli put me on to this story by Peter Carey which can be read according to those same concerns. He is one of the better-known names in the unknown pantheon of Australian literature.

There is a genuine horror here. There is also much that has ‘aged well’ – hoarding property, building walls, and the intrigue of small transgressions in suburbia. But I think Carey in 1974 was realising something about art or Australia or both that remains unacknowledged: the only available pastime is building tiny models of our situation, then taking them apart.

Published in American Dreams, University of Queensland Press, 1974

‘The Fat Man in History’ by Peter Carey

In the struggle to find out what sort of stories I wanted to write, along with Jim Crace, it was Peter Carey whose brilliant, strange and surreal early work that kept dragging me away from a more conventional realism. In ‘The Fat Man in History’ – also the title of his first collection – a post-revolutionary society has marginalized fat men, believing them to be the embodiment of pre-revolutionary oppression and greed. Alexander Finch, a depressed former political cartoonist, lives in a dilapidated house with his fellow fat men plotting to overthrow the new order. It’s funny and sad and full of beautiful writing.

First published in The Fat Man in History, (University of Queensland Press, 1974)