My Life As A Fake by Peter Carey

My Life As A Fake

by Peter Carey

Vintage, Random House, 2004, ISBN 1740513088, large c-format paperback with wraps

Very Good Condition, some edge and shelf wear, some rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, previous owners inscription to half title page, age toned fore edges,  (see photographs)

“In Melbourne in the 1940s, a conservative young poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach the country a lesson about pretention and authenticity.  Choosing as his target the most avant-garde of the literary magazines, he submits for publication the entire oeuvre of one Bob McCorkle, a working-class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at twenty-four and entirely the product of Chubb’s imagination.  Not only does the magazine fall for the hoax, but its editor is prosecuted for publishing obscenity.  During the trial, someone uncannily resembling the man in the faked photograph of the invented McCorkle leaps to his feet.  At this moment a horrified Chubb is confronted by the malevolent being he has himself manufactured.
Using as a springboard the Ern Malley hoax, Peter Carey wickedly and ruefully explores how the phantom poet taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker, pursuing Chubb from Melbourne to the seedy, sweaty, tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur.”