Theft - Peter Carey
Umpteen reviews of Theft have been floating around ever since its release and they uniformly create an impression of Theft being a book whose (yeah whose - aren't books alive somehow?) way with words will make rereading far more enjoyable than the reading.
While the Booker 2006 longlist was as far as it went in terms of a prize, that doesn't really matter when the author is Peter Carey. There will certainly be elements of the book that a reader can savour, recollect, return to.
NPR Podcast review by Maureen Corrigan - Theft will arrest your attention.
Complete-Review's links to various reviews. A seems to be the rating.
Ali Smith in the Telegraph observes
Carey loves to goad acceptable style, knock it off its perch. As a writer he is in love not just with the place where 'fakery' meets 'reality' but with the Molotov mix of so-called high and low art; here he courts everything from Rembrandt to Pollock, obsessed with what doesn't get to be 'art' and why. In particular Theft's headlong helterskeltering owes a lot to that favourite book of Hugh's, Norman Lindsay's riotous Australian children's book, The Magic Pudding (1918), all farce, thievery and swaggering joy, a work of shapeshifting brilliance in both voice and illustration. But - is it art?John Updike in the New Yorker also alludes to Nabokov, Joyce and of Carey 'running away with it' in Theft.
{aside: I've linked to the Smith and Updike review because their introduction and conclusion are eerily similar}
Theft buzz in the blogs.
Other related links.
