30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account - Softcover

Carey, Peter

3.38

587 ratings by Goodreads

9781596915695: 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596915692 ISBN 13: 9781596915695

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2008

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"This is a fabulously idiosyncratic small masterpiece ... it's so good it takes your breath away."―Times (UK)

After living abroad for years, novelist Peter Carey returns home to Sydney and attempts to capture its character. Seeking the help of his old friends, Carey is soon drawn into their strange, anarchic worlds, each one orbiting the place he has come back to see. The result is a wild and wonderful journey of discovery and rediscovery as bracing as the southerly bluster that sometimes batters Sydney's shores. Famous sights such as Bondi Beach, the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and the Blue Mountains all take on a strange new intensity when exposed to the penetrating gaze of the author and his friends.

30 Days in Sydney offers the reader an enchanting glimpse behind the facades and the Venetian blinds of the city.

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About the Author:

Peter Carey received the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda and again for True History of the Kelly Gang. His other awards include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. His most recent novel His Illegal Self was published in 2008. Born in Australia in 1943, he now lives in New York, where he is the director of the Hunter College MFA program in creative writing.

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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