Oscar and Lucinda [Paperback]

Peter Carey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 1997

Winner of the 1988 Booker Prize, this striking novel, set in Victorian England and Australia but told with a contemporary perspective, depicts the fatal and unrequited love shared by two remarkable misfits.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ralph Fiennes, who stars in the film version of Oscar and Lucinda, reads a nicely abridged version of Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel. The audio captures much of the book's vibrant prose, delicately eliminating minor characters and digressions. Lucinda's sudden appearance in London is even more abrupt and confusing than in the book, but Fiennes's carefully clipped British pronunciation helps make things clearer. Not only is he a better actor on tape than in the movie, but he becomes a superb storyteller as well, evoking multiple characters with supreme mastery of pitch, pace, and tone. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

If Illywhacker astounded us with its imaginative richness, this latest Carey novel does so again, with a masterly sureness of touched added. It's a story, in a sense the story, of mid-19th century England and Australia, narrated by a man of our time and therefore permeated with modern consciousness. Oscar is a shy, gawky, Oxford-educated Church of England minister with a tortured conscience; Lucinda is a willful, eccentric Australian who sinks her family inheritance into a glass factory; and the basis for the star-crossed love that develops between them is a shared passion for gambling. They meet on the boat to Sydney, Oscar becomes Lucinda's lodger after being defrocked for his "vice" and, finally, leaving a trail of scandal behind them, they construct a glass church in the Outback, their wildest gamble yet. The narrative techniques though which Carey dramatizes the effects of English religious beliefs and social mores upon frontier Australia smack of both Dickens and of Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman; but he doesn't lean upon his sources, he uses them, for his own subtle and controlled purposes. His prose (full of such flashes as "A cormorant broke from the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dream and life") is an almost constant source of surprise, and he is clearly in the forefront of that literary brilliance now flowing out of Australia. 30,000 first printing; $35,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Faber Faber Inc (November 30, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571192920
• ISBN-13: 978-0571192922
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,260,661 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Almost as good as 'Bliss', July 30, 2000

By 

Steve Gold - See all my reviews

This review is from: Oscar and Lucinda (Paperback)

Having read Carey's first novel, 'Bliss', I really didn't think he could write something as good. Luckily for him, and me, and anyone else who reads 'Oscar and Lucinda', he's come very close.

Nothing really happens in the book, but it doesn't matter; there's a beauty in the language used that is extremely rare. This book is pure characterization. Carey's characters are dense and human and live before the book begins and after it ends. It's a love story, but not a conventional one. The love between Oscar and Lucinda builds and builds with every written word, up to an ending which even the most astute and well-read reader will never expect. The ending is what makes the book. It is powerful. I haven't cried since I was a boy, but I came damn close reading the last few pages. It's really incredible stuff.

I found I was thinking about the last scene for weeks after I finished the book; I've even gone back and read sections. How often does a book do that to you? Not very often, I bet. 'Oscar and Lucinda' is a bit slow, but always interesting, surprising, and touching, like 'Bliss', but in completely different ways. The imagery is brilliant -- you will not see the scenes, you will stand there, with the characters, feeling the sun on your face, breathing the same air they breath. That's how good this is. Go and read it.

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, December 13, 2000

By 

GZA "gza" (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Oscar and Lucinda (Paperback)

Oscar and Lucinda is the best book by my favourite living author. I am a failed writer, and it is thanks to authors as talented as Peter Carey (and there are only a handful) that I chose to give up: I couldn't possibly hope to capture human life on the page, with all its infinite possibilities, as beautifully, gracefully, amusingly and touchingly as Peter Carey. As Angela Carter writes on the dust jacket of my copy, "It fills me with a wild, savage envy, and no novelist could say fairer than that". I am currently half way through my second reading of Oscar and Lucinda, and I know what is in store for me. I am prepared to sob like a child, and I am relishing it.

Set in England and Australia in the nineteenth century, the novel is essentially about the precariousness of existence and how people's lives are constructed by chance. Its essence is perhaps best captured in Oscar's speech to Lucinda on the ship Leviathan: "Our whole faith is a wager...We bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it...We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence". And so they sit down to a game of cards.

Objectivity is perhaps an unattainable goal. When I recommend Oscar and Lucinda to my friends, they generally enjoy it. But this is not enough for me. I want them to feel it as keenly as I do - that Carey is an astonishing writer, possessed of an imagination, intelligence, wit and compassion, and the ability to imbue his writing with these qualities, unrivalled by any living author. And that Oscar and Lucinda is a strange, evocative, beautiful, tender novel which will make them laugh and make them cry and make them wish it would never end. I hope this is recommendation enough.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Experience 19th-Century Australia, February 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Oscar and Lucinda (Paperback)

For a week, all I wanted to do was read this book. I read it afew months ago, and I still think of the characters. A truly good bookoffers beginnings, struggles, strides and redemption, and this is such a novel. Lucinda is a hero like none other -- she transcends any conventionality. Her life and actions are so unexpected, so real. She is completely her own person, and I marvel at Carey's ability to know her so well. Carey does it all. He masterfully tells a story of theology, human weakness, passion, geography, politics and history. All this is implicit in the text -- you don't get the impression he's sticking stuff in for authenticity -- it's all relevant. Oscar and Lucinda is not a simplistic book, but it's such a quick read. Sometimes when an author is brilliant, they put you off by showing off. Carey is the kind of person you know is an excellent writer, but only because you love the story. And the characters will inhabit your life. I'm not being hyperbolic. I was fascinated with each life -- I cared what happened. I've never gambled, and yet I felt as excited as Lucinda when she entered the parlors and back rooms. Voyages and sweeping landscape made this the best book I've read in a long time -- maybe ever.