{"id":55587,"date":"2018-01-25T04:32:08","date_gmt":"2018-01-25T04:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55587"},"modified":"2018-01-25T04:44:50","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T04:44:50","slug":"a-long-way-from-home-review-peter-careys-best-novel-in-decades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55587","title":{"rendered":"A Long Way from Home review \u2013 Peter Carey\u2019s best novel in decades"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Long Way from Home<\/strong> review \u2013 Peter Carey\u2019s best novel in decades<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a>
\n2018-01-15<\/p>\n

Alex Preston<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The acclaimed writer\u2019s 14th novel is a nuanced story of racial identity set in postwar Australia<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Writers are by nature chameleons, with each new character a new disguise to take on, a fresh skin to inhabit. It shouldn\u2019t surprise, then, that racial passing<\/a> has such a rich literary history. Nella Larsen\u2019s<\/a> 1929 novel, Passing<\/em><\/a>, is a near-forgotten classic, telling of two mixed-race women, Clare and Irene, who identify as white and black respectively. More recently, we\u2019ve had Philip Roth\u2019s<\/a> The Human Stain<\/em><\/a>, in which the African American Coleman Silk attempts to pass for a Jewish academic. Then there\u2019s Francis Spufford\u2019s Golden Hill<\/em><\/a>, whose concluding revelation about one of the characters\u2019 racial identities does what all good end-of-book twists ought to, shedding new light on the entire novel.<\/p>\n

A Long Way from Home<\/em><\/a>, Peter Carey\u2019s<\/a> 14th novel, uses the story of a light-skinned Indigenous Australian who has been brought up white to address the country\u2019s brutal history of racism. It seems strange at first that Carey \u2013 surely Australia\u2019s greatest living novelist, even if he hasn\u2019t dwelled there for decades \u2013 has taken so long to get around to the subject. In a recent interview in the Australian<\/em>, he said that he\u2019d always felt that it was not the place of a white writer to tell this tale. Then something changed: \u201cYou can\u2019t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we \u2013 I \u2013 have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The acclaimed writer\u2019s 14th novel is a nuanced story of racial identity set in postwar Australia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,4405,6462],"tags":[27956,986,27955,2103],"class_list":["post-55587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-oceania","category-passing-2","tag-alex-preston","tag-australia","tag-peter-carey","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55587"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55590,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55587\/revisions\/55590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}