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My Life As A Fake (HB, 2003)

Format: Hardback

ISBN: 1740512464

Author: Peter Carey

Publisher: Random House Australia Pty Ltd

Publication Date: 2003

Number of Pages: 280

Language: English

Weight (gm): 575

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Book Condition / Grade: VG+. Deckle Edges.

Dust-jacket Condition / Grade: VG

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Description: A fantastical gothic tale, inspired both by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the Ern Malley hoax. Sara, a poetry editor on holiday in Kuala Lumpur, meets an Australian, Christopher Chubb, in a bicycle shop. Chubb shows her an unbelievable scrap of poetry. She wants to publish it in her ailing poetry journal. Chubb insists that Sara hear his story first, this being the central plot of this novel. As a conservative young poet in Melbourne in the 1950s, he decided to teach the literary avant-gardes a lesson. He submits for publication the poetry a working-class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at 24, and entirely the product of Chubb's imagination. The magazine falls for the hoax, and its editor is prosecuted for publishing obscenity. At the trial someone uncannily resembling the fake poet leaps to his feet. The horrified Chubb is confronted by the malevolent being he had himself manufactured. Wickedly explores how the phantom poet haunts ends up destroying his maker, pursuing Chubb from Melbourne to the seedy, tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur.