Cheap His Illegal Self (Book) (Peter Carey) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of His Illegal Self

His Magician Self
Much of the world in Peter Carey's latest novel HIS ILLEGAL SELF is seen through the eyes of Che Selkirk, a bright seven-year-old who one day in 1972 meets the woman he recognizes immediately and goes from the arms of his wealthy grandmother, an Upper East Side woman with "tailored gray hair," on a journey that ultimately takes him to Queensland. There he learns to survive hippie-like in the Australian outback far away from his earlier coddled existence. He and the woman nicknamed Dial, a six-feet tall amazon, as outlaws, make a life for themselves, aided and abetted by the strange character Trevor, an Australian, who can neither read nor write, listens to the Book of Revelation on tape and prefers to go naked in the bush as often as he can. <
> <
>HIS ILLEGAL SELF is first and foremost an extraordinary story that takes on a life of its own and will hold you in its grip. Your only task is to keep turning the pages of this 272 page novel although it seems much shorter. It left me wanting more. Although you will be hard put to find a stranger love story, Dial and Trevor's affection for this sometimes lonely lad-- he loves his cat Buck-- eager to know his parents, radical student activists of the 1960's, seep through on practical every page of this all too short story. Mr. Carey's love for his homeland comes through as well. <
> <
>Mr. Carey is a magician when it comes to language and reminds us over and over that he is a master of the Queen's English. Che's warm Hershey bar is "soft and bendy." After having been given a full-page photograph of his outlaw father from LIFE magazine, he looked at it, then "folded up his father very carefully and kept him in his pocket." He cannot understand why Australians speak, "words like ground beef in their mouths." Che on Dial: "She was nice to him, but careful now, and sometimes playing cards he felt a cloud of sadness settle on them both, like bugs around a lamp." Finally "the boy saw how the moonlight was caught in the gauze of many little wings, white ants, mosquitoes, moths with black jeweled bodies. <
> <
>Peter Carey has the ability-- not often found in writers-- to create one novel after another without repeating himself. Certainly one of the finest living novelists, he is a joy to read.

---

A Must Read
Carey's beautiful new novel is about Che, a boy being raised by his New York society grandmother in the '70's. Che longs to know his parents, dissidents forced underground by their antiwar activities. When he's kidnapped by Anna (aka Dial), Che thinks she's his mom, and Anna, acting on orders from his mother, doesn't correct him. The two flee to Australia's outback where Anna belives they're "off the grid". Carey's stark language imbues the narrative with suspense, and his characters feel absolutely real. He's crafted an unconventional love story that's a striking portrait of the counterculture's dregs. <
> <
>This is a great book. The story keeps the readers interest and makes it impossible to put down. You come to love all of the characters, whose decisions dont always make sense at first but seem to work themselves out by the end of the story - Highly reccomended

---

Real Love and Visual Artifice
Che Selkirk is a boy whose parents, members of the increasingly violent Students for a Democratic Society, have both disappeared, leaving him with his very rich grandmother. At the age of eight, a woman that Che recognises as his mother suddenly arrives and kidnaps him, taking him from New York to Australia. This is how the book begins, and Che's adventure through hunger, love and loss becomes almost a coming of age tale as he starts to understand who he is and where his future lies. <
> <
>On the simplest of levels, the book is a super fast-paced race across the globe as Che and Dial attempt to hide from the police and carve an existence for themselves. The plot is propelled by both the readers own dislocation as they come to grips with the distortions between the two narrative voices. Both Che and Dial are presented as equals - joint narrators in this story, but their stories aren't identical. The reader is put in the uncomfortable position of being between them, unable to discount either the intensity of Che's needs, or the combination of confusion and desire which motivates Dial. Both need one another, and continue to work together at avoiding the truth and avoiding the law, at the same time they find themselves removed from their usual lives, and co-opted for causes they don't believe in. <
> <
>As in so many of Carey's novels, real love and visual artifice become the two forces that move the narrative along. It's a search for a truth that isn't nearly as obvious as one might think. It's about the way love crisscrosses us - marks us, makes us whole, and hurts us at the same time. It isn't just the love--both real and imagined--between Che and Dial, but also the odd love circulating uncomfortably between Dial, Susan Selkirk, Che's father, Che, and Trevor. <
> <
>In an act of remarkable self-control, Carey leaves the story open, suggesting a long and complex history which the reader isn't privy to. This last sentence so changes the story that this reader at least went back and re-read it in its entirety, taking in the rich linguistic power which Carey has become famous for. Che is believable, both as the 8 year old boy struggling to find himself, and as the older, wiser narrator he becomes by the end of the book. One can imagine many other landscapes, or books growing out of this boy. But for now, there's only the reader's imagination, which Carey has kickstarted with this moving novel. <
> <
>Magdalena Ball is the author of the award winning novel [[ASIN:1904492967 Sleep Before Evening]]