Parrot and Olivier in America
Record details
- ISBN: 9780307358363 (electronic bk.)
- ISBN: 0307358364 (electronic bk.)
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Physical Description:
remote
1 online resource (379 pages) - Publisher: Toronto : Random House Canada, [2010]
- Copyright: ©2010
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Source of Description Note: | Description based on print version record. |
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Genre: | Fiction. Electronic books. |
Electronic resources
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2009 November #1
*Starred Review* Two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey's transfixing novels are at once sharply funny and profoundly resonant. They are shaped by his sharp insight into the conflict between an individual's will and circumstances, hence his fascination with historical figures. In his latest imaginative and commanding tale, Carey presents a brilliant and sly variation on the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the indelible Democracy in America. High-strung, smart, and snobbish, Olivier is sent to America by his parents, who barely avoided the guillotine during the French Revolution, to escape the reignited Terror. A long-suffering Englishman called Parrot, the orphaned son of a printer, is charged with protecting Olivier (whom he dubs "Lord Migraine"), but he has other concerns, especially an intrepid painter named Mathilde. A master of the dual narrative, Carey has fastidious yet observant Olivier (his take on Americans and rocking chairs is priceless) and shrewd and articulate Parrot take turns telling their astonishing stories in a picaresque adventure spiked with revelations personal and societal. Echoes of Tocqueville's masterpiece are matched by intimations of Mark Twain, while Parrot mirrors James John Audubon. Remarkably fluent in history, Carey is not beholden to his sources but, rather, empowered to create a thrillingly fresh and incisive drama of extraordinary personalities set during a time of world-altering vision and action. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews. - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 2011 January
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In his remarkably mature debut, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason takes liberties with a literary classic to produce a fascinating novel that succeeds on its own merits. Mason uses Homer's work as a foundation and writes in a style that's poetic yet accessible. He departs from tradition by putting his own spin on Odysseus' adventures, playing a game of what-if throughout the book and tinkering with famous plotlines. Mason's hero, for instance, opts not to use the Trojan horse, and his Penelope, hardly the patient, penitent wife-in-waiting she's famously known to be, goes ahead and takes a husbandâa fat old fellow posing as Odysseus. These clever variations on the original tale are so convincingly executed, they seem like natural parts of the narrative. Fully developed yet interconnected, the book's chapters take the form of short stories or brief set pieces. Footnotes explaining the original text and expounding on the new add an extra layer to this delightfully innovative novel. Inventive and inspired, Mason's book breathes new life into a time-honored epic.
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WHEN IN ROME
With The Imperfectionists, his shrewd debut, Tom Rachman offers a compelling look at the news industry as it used to be. Set in the not-too-distant past, when the phrase "hot off the presses" still had meaning, the novel focuses on an English-language paper in Rome. Capturing the hectic pace that characterizes a newsroom, the novel unfolds in short chapters, each of which is centered around a different employee. Arthur Gopal, who writes obituaries, strives to do as little as possible at the paper, yet, when his personal life falls apart, he finds new inspiration in his work. Paris correspondent Lloyd Burko tries to extract state secrets from his son, but what he learns has more to do with family politics than government policy. Copyeditor Dave Bellingâfreshly firedâbecomes romantically involved with the woman who laid him off. The paper that unites these disparate personalities is on the brink of collapse, which makes their stories all the more poignant. Rachman, a newspaperman himself, knows whereof he writes. This is a skillfully executed portrait of a culture that may soon be obsolete.
A reading group guide is available.
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TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
Featuring a deliciously twisty plot and a pair of unforgettable leading characters, Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America is a rip-roaring work of historical fiction. Olivier de Garmont, a fictional French aristocrat based on Alexis de Tocqueville, is the pampered son of protective parents whoâprompted by France's uncertain political climateâsend him to safety in America. Watching over Olivier in the New World is an Englishman named Parrot. A member of the working class and tough as brass, Parrot has little patience for his spoiled charge. Olivier, for his part, is taken aback by the lack of manners and lust for money that seem to characterize most Americans. His adventures with Parrot in New York and Philadelphia, among other places, give rise to the sort of witty, sophisticated insights for which de Tocqueville was known. This complex and comedic work has earned Carey much well-deserved acclaim.
A reading group guide is available.
Copyright 2011 BookPage Reviews.
- BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 2010 May
A picaresque journey through historyTo say that Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey's newest novel, is prodigiously researched is perhaps to miss the point. For while Carey is known for his at once wry and reverent take on historical fiction, and while his scrupulous study and vast knowledge of the 19th century is apparent on every page, it is rather the Booker Prize winner's thoroughly unquantifiable ability to inhabit his setting that so distinguishes him as a writer.
Based on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, Parrot and Olivier in America tells the story of Olivier-Jean-Baptist de Clarel de Barfleur, a lovably priggish French noble who, after narrowly escaping the Revolution's wrath, is shipped off to America under the pretext of studying the New World's progressive prison system. Also sent, as Olivier's servant and spy, is an Englishman known simply as Parrotâthe son of a printer-turned-forger and survivor of an Australian penal colony. Almost immediately the two clash, and each feels himself quite unfortunate to be in the company of the other. Try as they might, the two foils just cannot seem to shake each other, and what begins as animosity gradually grows into a loving and harmonious camaraderie.
Alternating between Olivier and Parrot's distinct viewpoints and voices, Carey takes readers on a picaresque and galloping romp through bygone times with delightfully antiquated dialogue and prose. The plot itself is too wonderfully convoluted to recount here, but suffice it to say there is an one-armed Marquis, a hysterical artist mistress and her dour mother and no shortage of colorful schemers along the way. The electricity and pace is exhilarating, rather than exhausting, and ultimately Carey's enthusiasm and energy become our own.
As much as Parrot and Olivier in America is a wickedly brilliant novel of events, it is also a tender paean to American democracy. After all, if insurmountable class is allegedly what separates our heroes to begin with, it is their eventual shared belief in egalitarianism that allows them the greatest gift Carey has to offer: friendship.
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Read reviews of other books by Peter Carey
Copyright 2010 BookPage Reviews.
- Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2010 March #1
A New World historical novel from Carey, the two-time Australian-born winner of the Man Booker prize. We start in the Old World. When the nobleman Olivier de Garmont is born in 1805, post-revolutionary France is still volatile. Olivier lost a grandfather to the guillotine. His parents remain in exile until the Bourbon Restoration. Olivier's liberal sentiments endanger him during the next revolution (July 1830), and his ultra-royalist mother decides he should be sent out of harm's way, to America. She acts through her confidant, the one-armed Marquis de Tilbot, and his middle-aged servant, known as Parrot, a most undeferential Englishman. Parrot's story: As a boy in England, he was rescued by de Tilbot after his father's wrongful arrest for forging banknotes, sent to Australia where he married and had a child, then was plucked away again by the Marquis. (All this dribbles out in flashbacks.) Olivier is drugged and put aboard a vessel to New York, together with Parrot. Now the nobleman has transplantation in common with his thrice-uprooted new servant. His cover story in America will be that he is investigating their prison system, as did another French nobleman, Alexis de Tocqueville, the inspiration for this novel. Carey's nobleman is a playful distortion of de Tocqueville, for Olivier is a nincompoop, myopic both literally and figuratively, with zero interest in prisons and slow to realize the resourcefulness of his savvy Parrot. Carey exploits this comic material only fitfully, though he cooks up some adventures for the odd couple and a romance for Olivier, who falls for the daughter of a Connecticut landowner ("I had arrived, quite unexpectedly, in Paradise.") Their starry-eyed courtship distracts attention from a more interesting development: the budding friendship between the principals ("in a democracyâ¦both parties know that the servant may at any moment become the master"). Quirky and erudite, but the payoff in human-interest terms is meager.First printing of 100,000 Copyright Kirkus 2010 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2010 January #1
Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont is French nobility, son of survivors of the French Revolution. Olivier has had every privilege and is acutely aware of his relative social position. Imagine his surprise and discomfort when he is banished, for his own safety, to newly emerging democratic America. Son of an itinerant English printer, with a colorful and varied past, Parrot proves an unlikely companion. Parrot is sent to accompany Olivier as his servant and secretary, with the secret mission of reporting Olivier's activities back to his mother in France. The story alternates between Parrot and Olivier, who narrate from their widely different points of view. Featuring well-developed and multifaceted characters (the novel was inspired by the life of Alexis de Tocqueville), this book is rife with humorous details and turns of phrase, and the language is sophisticated (readers might want to have a dictionary handy). VERDICT Written by a two-time Booker Prize winner, this engaging book will be particularly appreciated by readers interested in early 19th-century American history, the French aristocracy, and emerging democracy. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/09.]âSarah Conrad Weisman, Corning Community Coll. Lib., NY
[Page 88]. Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2009 December #1
Son of an itinerant tradesman, the English-born Parrot spies for a one-armed marquis in America, where he meets Olivier-who's modeled on Alexis de Tocqueville. My top fiction pick for this column; with an eight-city tour and a reading group guide. Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2009 November #2
The eminently talented Carey (Theft) has the gift of engaging ventriloquism, and having already channeled the voices of Dickens's Jack Maggs and the Australian folk hero/master thief Ned Kelly, he now inhabits Olivier-Jean-Baptist de Clarel de Barfleur, a fictionalized version of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose noble parents are aghast at his involvement in the events surrounding Napoleon's return and the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X. To remove him from danger, they send him to America, where priggish snob Olivier inspires Carey's humor during his self-centered adventures in New York, New England, and Philadelphia. Olivier can't shake his aristocratic disdain of raw-mannered, money-obsessed Americansâuntil he falls for a Connecticut beauty. More lovable is Parrot, aka John Larrit, who survives Australia's penal colony only to be pressed into traveling with Olivier as servant and secret spy for Olivier's mother. Though their relationship begins in mutual hatred, it evolves into affectionate comradeship as they experience the alien social and cultural milieus of the New World. Richly atmospheric, this wonderful novel is picaresque and Dickensian, with humor and insight injected into an accurately rendered period of French and American history. (Apr.)
[Page 27]. Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.