Parrot and Olivier in America

Reviews

“I finished it with unabated enjoyment…The language is vivid, forceful and poetic…There are terrific set pieces…moments Dickensian in their vividness…It’s a dazzling, entertaining novel.”

“Parrot and Olivier in America grabs its subject and marches down Main Street playing full out, provoking a reader’s delighted applause…Sentence for sentence, Carey’s writing remains matchlessly robust.”

“Gorgeously entertaining and moving…This is a novel of fierce attachments, charting the proximity of beauty and terror in the human soul.”

“Parrot and Olivier in America is a delicious, sprockety contraption, a comic historical picaresque…Like several of Carey’s previous novels, such as Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs, his book has an eighteenth-century robustness, a nineteenth-century lexicon, and a modern liberality…There are few contemporary writers with such a sure sense of narrative pungency and immediacy.”

“Carey braids his story carefully, lovingly…At its heart, Parrot and Olivier in America is a western; the simplest story in history, scuplted down to a twinkle in a philosopher’s eye: Man’s search for freedom.”

“Parrot and Olivier has all the quirky qualities that we have come to expect from Peter Carey: a winding narrative, a mass of vivid historical detail, and some very lively writing…The leading characters are beautifully drawn…[Offers] a gripping portrait of Jacksonian America in all its wild variety, from its model farms to its grungy boarding-houses, from its Fourth of July parades to its filthy streets full of copulating pigs.”

“Parrot and Olivier in America is such a literary work, even fuller than its predecessors of allusion, contrast and comic contradiction, that there is always more to find: the more you bring to it, the more rewarding its insinuations, its unpredictable switches between satire, serious reflection, and plain fun. Like Oscar and Lucinda (not to mention Carey’s other works), it demands and repays repeated reading.”

“Carey’s wonderfully witty and visual prose…springs surprise after surprise on the reader…his version of 1830s America allows him to comment on its modern counterpart: he touches lightly on, among many other things, sub-prime mortgages, an inflated art market and demagogic politicians.”

“An energetically intelligent novel…It bristles like a hedgehog with all of Carey’s spiky ideas…There’s enough to snag your imagination on, and to spare.”

“Carey’s novel is smart, charming and original…[He] finds comedy in unexpected places…Scenes of [Parrot and Olivier] with their respective love interests are realistic and poignant, and Carey…writes about America with a deeply felt but unsentimental sense of affection.”

“Carey’s fictionalization of Alexis de Tocqueville’s trip to America that inspired Tocqueville’s study Democracy in America makes for lively listening…Humphrey Bower dexterously juggles American, British, and French accents and keeps each characters distinct and multidimensional. He glides Parrot and Olivier’s wild mood and opinion swings and makes romantic passages light and moving.”

“Narrator Humphrey Bower perfectly juggles a variety of complex characters and accents in Carey’s historical novel. Olivier-Jean-Baptist de Clarel de Barfleur, a fictionalized version of Alexis de Tocqueville, is sent to America after his involvement in events surrounding Napoleon’s return and the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X. Humphrey Bower inhabits Olivier’s friend, the lovable Parrot, a.k.a. John Larrit, an ex-con who becomes Olivier’s servant and a spy for Olivier’s mother. Bower shows extraordinary vocal flexibility, pacing, and sensitivity as the relationship between Olivier and Parrot deepens against the remarkable tableau of undeveloped America and the rough-hewn people who created the greatest nation on earth.”

“Featuring well-developed and multifaceted characters…this book is rife with humorous details and turns of phrase, and the language is sophisticated…Written by a two-time Booker Prize winner, this engaging book will be particularly appreciated by readers interested in early nineteenth-century American history, the French aristocracy, and emerging democracy.”

“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…This complex and comedic work has earned Carey much well-deserved acclaim.”

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