Prize-winning Australian author Peter Carey's name keeps popping up on my radar, but many of his books are sadly a little too long for our group.  This one, shortlisted for several awards, however, looks like it could prove for some good discussion and divergent opinions.

"My Life as a Fake is loosely based on the Ern Malley hoax of 1943, in which two poets created a fictitious poet, Ern Malley, and submitted poems in his name to the literary magazine Angry Penguins.  [Carey] was interested in what the being would know instinctively and what he would be ignorant of. How would the creator deal with his creation, and the creation with his creator? It is told as a first-person narrative from the point of view of a young woman editing a literary magazine, and is presented as her account of her encounter with the perpetrator of the hoax after many years."

 Reviews :

"My Life as a Fake is so confidently brilliant, so economical yet lively in its writing, so tightly fitted and continuously startling." –John Updike, The New Yorker

 “Ingenious . . . Carey is as diabolical as the hoaxes that his book includes.” — NY Times 

"A wholly absorbing, bizarrely madcap comedy and a telling commentary on the sometimes baffling sources of art. . . . Though fiction, the book is anything but fake. It's truth, beauty and comedy wrapped in one sprightly package." –Chicago Tribune

“Peter Carey’s new novel comes like a monsoon after drought. It is a magnificent, poetic contemplation of the lying, fakery and insincerity inherent in the act of artistic creation. . . . It’s a charismatically furious piece of work, brilliantly meshing its ethical and artistic debate with a rich human drama.” –The Times (UK)

“Reads like the impossible offspring of a fictional ménage-à-trois involving Pale Fire, Lord Jim, and Our Man in Havana. . . . A fabulous book in the original sense of the term--and in the other one, too." –The Atlantic Monthly

"Brisk, relentlessly prankish... A virtuoso amalgam of styles, simultaneously a literary conundrum of the Borges variety, an exotic adventure tale evocative of both the settings and the narrative methods of Conrad, & a horror story derived from... Frankenstein." – NY Times Book Review

Awards:

• 2004 The Age Book of the Year. Shortlisted
• 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific Region, Best Book). Shortlisted
• 2004 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Fiction. Finalist
• 2004 Miles Franklin Award. Shortlisted
• 2004 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, Best Fiction Book. Shortlisted
• 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Longlisted

About the Author :

Peter Philip Carey (born 7 May 1943) is an Australian novelist and short story writer. He is one of only two writers, the other being South African–born J. M. Coetzee, to have won the Booker Prize twice. He won his first in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda, and won for the second time in 2001 with True History of the Kelly Gang. In May 2008 he was also nominated for the "Best of the Booker Prize".

Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times. He is frequently named as Australia's next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders. Currently, he is the executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. (from Wikipedia)

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