30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (Writer and the City) - Hardcover

Carey, Peter

3.38

589 ratings by Goodreads

9781582341668: 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (Writer and the City)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582341664 ISBN 13: 9781582341668

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2001

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Peter Carey captures our imagination with a brilliant and unexpected portrait of Sydney.

Bloomsbury is pleased to announce the second title in the phenomenally well-received Writer in the City series-in which some of the world's finest novelists reveal the secrets of the city they know best. In the midst of the 2000 Olympic games, Australia native Peter Carey returns to Sydney after a seventeen-year absence. Examining the urban landscape as both a tourist and a prodigal son, Carey structures his account around the four elements-Earth, Air, Fire, and Water-insisting on the primacy of nature to this unique Australian cityscape.

As his quixotic account unfolds, Carey looks both inward into his past (as well as Sydney's own violent history) and outward onto the city's familiar landmarks and surroundings-the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, the Blue Mountains-achieving just the right alchemy of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to tell Sydney's extraordinary story.

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About the Author:

Peter Carey is the author of seven highly praised novels, including the 1988 winner of the Booker Prize, Oscar and Lucinda. His latest novel is True History of the Kelly Gang. He lives in New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

In the second volume of Bloomsbury's The Writer and the City series, Carey (Oscar and Lucinda), an Australian native, returns to Sydney after 17 years. Armed with a battery-powered tape recorder, he badgers old friends including a Vietnam vet, a lawyer and an architect to contribute stories that might define Sydney. "A metropolis is, by definition, inexhaustible, and by the time I departed, thirty days later, Sydney was as unknowable to me as it had been on that clear April morning when I arrived," Carey concludes. He deftly intertwines dry facts about climate, geography and history with poetic stream of consciousness. The result is a desultory, impressionistic love letter to the city, structured loosely around earth, air, fire and water (one friend protected his home from bush fires; another barely survived the "murderous seas of the 1998 Sydney-Hobart race" which sank six yachts and killed five men). The acclaimed Booker Prize winner lets his characters direct the story, stepping in briefly to explain ("A rissole, in case you are from across the sea, is a kind of hamburger patty, but it is also an arsehole and also an RSL [Returned Services League]") and describe ("On Bondi I feel the space everywhere, not just in the luxury of beach and light but in that imagined house two streets back where I will not have to throw a book away to make room for each new one"). Carey touches lightly but firmly on Sydney's own brand of white guilt and patriotism, as well as its culture and landmarks. While other travelogues may provide more information, this effort will leave more lasting impressions.

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