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Peter Carey. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. New York. Knopf. 1995 ((C) 1994). 422 pages. $24. ISBN 0-679-43888-2.
Peter Carey's fifth novel, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, won the 1994 Age Book of the Year Award in Australia. This is Carey's first novel to be totally written outside his native country, since he has been a resident of New York for over five years now. The title makes us think of the picaresque and the hero's eighteenth-century namesake, Tristram Shandy. Carey's Tristan, however, has been democratized to an anonymous Smith.
Billed as a postmodern tragicomedy, Tristan Smith certainly falls into the post-modern allegorical genre. There is a ludic, ironic dialogue with the past. The diegesis is at once strange and familiar. Carey invents a mythic time and setting in order to...