Today.
Today is the day to
stop reading Amnesia by Peter Carey. At precisely page 68 of
the Faber and Faber paperback export edition of 2014.
Stopping likes this
leaves you with mixed feelings. Elation, disappointment, resentment,
amazement, that you started the thing at all and wonder as to how a
splendid writer like Peter Carey could so lose the run of himself as
to write it and how publishers and editors at an esteemed publishing
house could produce it.
Over all, you feel
better, though perhaps a little let down, as if you've been found
out. You are usually so sound in matters of judgement in all areas of
your life, none more so than in your choice of reading and here you
are with nearly 70 pages of wasted time and effort behind you. Of
course, you consider ploughing on. You considered it first at page 29
and the plough seemed viable enough at that stage. But no more.
Beyond the notion
that a book, like a lobster claw, has to 'grab you', it's hard to say
what didn't work for you with Peter Carey's Amnesia. Beyond
the sense that it is shite.
You wondered for a
while if you're weren't smart enough to get just how much parody
Peter Carey was loading into the sentences and the paragraphs and
then you began to realise that, far too often, you were putting the
book down because one of the sentences just read wrong.
I negotiated a
prescription for Dexedrine, a MacBook Pro, a Cabcharge account and,
finally, a place to live until my wife forgave me for being myself.
You read this and
realised you were simply not hip enough for this novel. There is no way
you could negotiate a prescription for Dexedrine and all the rest.
How many more times will you have to read novels where a seemingly
hapless man, very often a writer, who causes pain and mayhem for
those around him, as in this case, is 'saved' by having wealthy
friends who own yachts, castles and pent-houses and who has a cousin in the CIA to sort
passport, currency and immigration problems in cities labelled
foreign only because the writer doesn't live there. Peter Carey lives
in New York and even his home place, Australia, site of his luminous
books, Oscar and Lucinda and Ned Kelly is foreign to
him in Amnesia.
Living in New York
doesn't help Pete Carey with the New York Times. Janet Maslin,
writing in that paper reckons
“Amnesia”
can’t sustain a sense of purpose throughout. For all Mr. Carey’s
formidable powers and the righteous fire he means to light here,
“Amnesia” isn’t one of his most memorable efforts.
It's just as well
that you read that after you'd stopped. If the New York Times doesn't
reckon much of the book, then maybe your judgement isn't impaired,
just napping. If you'd read that review before you stopped, you might
have heaved the plough out of the mire, in a rage of stubbornness,
and driven your tractor on to the end of field, over the edge and
into the despair of the reader who looks back on lost days when you
could have been reading, say, Balthasar and Blimunda by Jose
Saramago or Pronto by Elmore Leonard or an ice-cold and
refreshing short story by Nadine Gordimer.
Stopping is good,
because it means you can start again.
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