Peter Carey's Collected Stories

Collected Stories ~ Peter Carey
Genre: Short Stories; Fiction (including a couple of fantasy and sci-fi short stories).
9.5/10

Before I even start talking about the text itself, let me just say I read it through in January this year, was amazed by it, lent it to brother, he was amazed with it, bought himself and a number of his friends copies and took a long time to return my copy to me.

This is one of my Literature 3/4 texts, and to tell the truth I'm amazingly glad that it is. The short stories, though very bizarre, are complex and engrossing. Carey treads thin-thematic ice in regards to the colonisation of Australia (and cultural genocide) by America, focusing especially on the way that Australia has become a victim of the influence of America with regard to dreams (as seen in American Dreams), and how this perversion of Australian culture can lead to nothing good. Carey also delves into isolation, and how this can act as a catalyst and exacerbate the baser tendencies, as well as decreasing the mental stability of the isolated and often marginalised protagonists. These are but a drop in the ocean, with Carey investigating the objectification of women, undercurrents in society, as well as the base and taboo subjects which are seldom talked about but quite likely performed more than one would like to think. In regards to taboo Carey is ruthless, depicting copophragia, incest, rape, dictatorships, cannibalism and homosexuality all with a dispassionate and generally omniscient narration.

What I found most intriguing however was the way that Carey defied the boundaries between reality and fantasy, often merging the two so seamlessly that the reader loses all track of what is real and what is not. To call the stories bizarre is an understatement, but the nuance that can be found in Carey's trademark concise sentences is often far more shocking than the terrible acts that provide the base for Carey's investigation into the human psyche. From stories about mimes and talking unicorns to analytical reports of a revolution and the revulsion of fat people that stems from it, Carey manages to be consistent, though varied. In regards to consistency he often deals with the same themes, and in all of them can be seen important messages about humanity and the way that it goes through the motions. With respect to variety, every single story out of the twenty-six short stories found in the 454-page long collection deals with a completely different scenari, with different characters and often in very different worlds.

Carey's ability to place bizarre and amazingly unconventional acts within diconcertingly commonplace situations spawns a concurrently surreal and disturbing effect, as Carey explores the multi-faceted nature of every single scene and situation present in the short stories. In stories like "The Puzzling Nature of Blue", "American Dreams" and "Report on the Shadow Industry", Carey analyses the pervasive influence of the politcal on the personal as well as the illusory appeals of artistic creation. Other stories, like "Life and Death in the South Side Pavilion" (my brother's personal favourite), "The Fat Man in History" and "The Uses of Williamson Wood" (my personal favourite) explore the situations of the marginalised of society, the fat, the mentally and physically abused, the weak and the deadbeats, their triumphs and their dilemmas (with special emphasis on the latter).

To tell the truth, my immature and somewhat sub-standard reviewing abilities really can't reproduce the thoughts flying about my head, so I'll leave it basically with this.

The Sydney Morning Herald said that reading Peter Carey's Collected Stories is like "being shot by a firing squad of angels."

Peter Carey claimed diffidently that he had "made a whole career out of making my anxieties get up and walk around."

Laura Cummings, Sunday Times, August 13, 1995;
"Here is a man who can put you into the head of Homer in the blistering heat ("Light falls on his blind eyes like coloured rain on a tiled roof") as he exhaustedly rearranges the "small coins" of his characters within the great epic..."

Simply a must-read, especially if you are fond of complex and post-modernistic short stories.
(Not simply a must read, but a must CLOSE read...every time you read a sentence you realise something new about what Carey was trying to say.)

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