True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
352 pages
Published 2000
Read from September 20 to September 22
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Dare
I say it -- reading 122 books this year (so far!) has made my reading
tastes slightly more... sophisticated. There are still embarrassing
moments where I rate juvenile fic flavors of the month higher than certain classics of English language literature,
but then, I've always been up-front about the capricious, wholly
subjective nature of my ratings. On the other hand, not every
well-written piece of modern literary fiction is going to automatically
blow me away now.
Peter Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America
was the first book this year that really and truly amazed me. It's
interesting to note how effusive I was in my praise for that book -- the
power of Carey's writing, the poetry of his word choice -- while with True History of the Kelly Gang,
I'm content to note, "That was a good book. I liked it quite a lot." I
did love the vernacular rhythm of Kelly's narrative voice, but after all
this reading this year, I accept it as a job well done instead of
elevating it as an artistic revelation.
That said (and I always
segue into my concluding paragraph with a variation on "That said," it's
getting a bit repetitive, don't you think?), True History was an excellent book, fully up to the standard I expected of Carey after Parrot & Olivier.
Like all tragedies, knowing the outcome from the start doesn't lessen
the effect, or make it any less of a bummer once you've closed the book
and put it away.
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