週六版的Guardain 介紹了Peter Carey 談到 在紐約生活 與母國澳洲的雙重文化的創作歷程 Between two worlds http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2243146,00.html Peter Carey has lived in New York for 20 years, but has returned repeatedly to his native Australia in his fiction. Both cultures have been the guiding spirit of his work Nicholas Wroe Saturday January 19, 2008 ............................................ Despite being wary of writing directly about America, Carey has long appreciated the pivotal role of American culture, whether he was living in Melbourne or New York. In His Illegal Self the American woman arriving in the Australian commune is shocked at how antagonistic, even though they supposedly shared a political outlook, her hosts are to her country: "We didn't even know these people were out there, and all this time they'd been hating America." Carey says he is still struck by how little his American friends comprehend how deeply they affect the rest of the world. "There are tiny scraps of American popular culture deeply embedded in nearly every other culture. I can remember being at a party years ago with the Australian writer Helen Garner and the American writer Craig Unger who was genuinely amazed that Helen could talk knowledgeably about Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. Unger couldn't believe that we'd heard of Friedman." Carey's own engagement with American culture is still a work in progress. He fulminates against the Bush administration, but is perplexed by the left's response: "who would have thought that Vanity Fair would expose its lies and become the Mother Jones of our time". In His Illegal Self there are mentions of both Jack London's White Fang and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, but he "didn't officially get" Huck Finn until he heard Garrison Keillor read it on tape. "It can come over quite corny on the page, but Keillor's is a lovely performance that gets through all that and actually unlocked something for me, which is a real gift. It would have been a shame to go through life not getting Huck Finn." And this ad-hoc negotiation between cultures seems to have been the guiding spirit of his career. Although he set out on this latest novel with the new approach of his vision of the woman and a boy, he says that, in hindsight, "all my books somehow come back to the colonial situation of one country and another country. It is true of Illywhacker, of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs. Tristan Smith is absolutely about that and so is The Kelly Gang, which throws in Ireland as well. "They seem to come down to one country looking at itself in terms of another, and within that country the outskirts looking at themselves in terms of the metropolitan centre. When you set out on a book you always think you're onto something new. I've come to learn that it's only years later you discover you've spent your whole life doing the same thing." Inspirations As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (read by Garrison Keillor) --

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