Now that Peter Carey's novel, Theft: A Love Story has hit the Australian bookshops we will be getting a number of reviews published over the coming weekend. Just so that they don't get lost in the rush I offer the following two, already out there.
In "Time" magazine, Michael Fitzgerald is quite taken with the book: "... Carey shifts his magpie gaze to an art world overflowing with unscrupulous dealers, avaricious collectors and modernist forgeries, but ... the question of creative worth would seem to resonate strongly with the Booker Prize winner...Theft should sweep Carey's writerly anxieties away. After the chaotic excesses of My Life as a Fake, his new narrative grabs you by the throat and proceeds with a comic urgency not seen since True History of the Kelly Gang."
In contrast, Rosemary Sorenson, in "The Courier-Mail", is not so sure the book works: "As always (except when he's long-winded, Oscar and Lucinda a case in point), he entertains, but he infuriates rather too often for this 'love story' to be rated one of his best." And the novel's characters "...are not characters made for loving. That wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact they are not made properly for living either...That is, they don't come fully alive in Carey's ferocious, exhausting, adrenalin-rush blast of a novel."
