SOURCE: Review of My Life as a Fake, by Peter Carey. Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 17 (1 September 2003): 1086-87.

In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of My Life as a Fake, calling the novel a “Nabokovian masterpiece.”

The two-time New Zealand Booker winner (True History of the Kelly Gang, 2000, etc.) traces the honeycombed ramifications of a brazen literary hoax (based on a real incident that occurred in 1943 in Australia) [in My Life as a Fake].

Carey's initial narrator is Englishwoman Sarah Wode-Douglass, who edits a struggling magazine, and, more or less impulsively, accompanies renegade writer John Slater on a trip to Kuala Lumpur—despite “hating him all my life”—for what she believes was Slater's adulterous responsibility for her mother's suicide. That's one complication. Then, in Malaysia, Sarah encounters poet maudit Christopher Chubb, now a homeless indigent subsisting as a bicycle repairman, who claims a history with...