GET LIT: Win a copy of Peter Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America

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GET LIT: Win a copy of Peter Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America

POSTED: Tuesday, April 6, 2010, 3:03 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

Knopf, 400 pp., $26.95, April 20

Book Quarterly Trivia Week continues this morning with Australian-turned-New Yorker Peter Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America. In anticipation of Carey's talk at the Free Library on April 29, we're giving away a copy to one lucky reader. Here's what our resident lit critic, Justin Bauer, had to say about Carey's new work:

His latest is a thick, meaty period piece, inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville's 1831 tour of the United States. It spices dry Jacksonian history with period-appropriate picaresque. And, as the title hints, it's a buddy comedy, complete with a mismatched toffee-nosed master and wily servant groping toward mutual respect and affection in the strange, egalitarian atmosphere of frontier America.The pitfalls of this premise are all too obvious. ... The alternating-chapter master-servant pattern the book follows means we sometimes spend time with effete and self-deluding aristocrat Olivier that we would rather pass with Parrot, the sharp artist and forger sent to keep tabs on His Nibs. Despite these challenges, Carey's skill wins out — both by presenting Tocqueville's trenchant observations on the American character with a contemporary credit-crunch hindsight, and by managing his characters' reconciliation so deftly that history recedes into the background.

To win a copy, answer the following trivia question:

For what two novels has Peter Carey won the Booker Prize?

E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win; and check back to Critical Mass this afternoon for more fiction giveaways.

Posted by Carolyn Huckabay @ 3:03 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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