{"product_id":"theft-isbn-9780307276483","title":"Theft","description":"Michael \"Butcher\" Boone is an ex-“really famous\" painter, now reduced to living in a remote country house and acting as caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh. Alone together they've forged a delicate equilibrium, a balance instantly destroyed when a mysterious young woman named Marlene walks out of a rainstorm and into their lives. Beautiful, smart, and ambitious, she's also the daughter-in-law of the late great painter Jacques Liebovitz. Soon Marlene sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making--or the ruin--of them all.\u003cp\u003e“Utterly absorbing. . . . Carey’s book is afire with passion, both love and loathing.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \"Brilliant Peter Carey has written another marvelous novel. . . . \u003cb\u003eTheft\u003c\/b\u003e is witty, urbane, funny and profound down to its last searing line.\"—\u003ci\u003eThe Baltimore Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \"[A] very funny new novel [with an] ingeniously worked-out art-fraud plot. . . . \u003cb\u003eTheft\u003c\/b\u003e is the kind of novel only an abundantly gifted artist, and one serious about his craft, could produce.\" —\u003ci\u003eSan Jose Mercury News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Peter Carey is a superb writer, whose prose is always active, and who infuses his characters, however eccentric, with a warmth that lets them live in our minds.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Magnificent. . . . Hypnotically brilliant, entirely original.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Peter Carey’s funny, rumbustious new novel takes on the contemporary art world. . . . Written with terrific verbal energy and a snide, lashing sense of humor, \u003cb\u003eTheft\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eis a marvelous caper, a wicked little love story and a fine mockery of an industry that probably deserves it.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “In a word, superb. . . . It’s not just the story, which is a roller coaster, or the characters, each of whom is so memorable, but the sheer physicality of Carey’s writing that makes \u003cb\u003eTheft\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eso good. Read it. You won’t be disappointed.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Plain Dealer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Opening a Peter Carey novel is a little like being seduced. . . . If you haven’t already, you might want to introduce yourself to Peter Carey. \u003cb\u003eTheft\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eis a virtuoso inauguration, not to mention a great first date.” —\u003ci\u003ePittsburgh Post-Gazette\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Carey is a choral group; from novel to novel he soars or plunges from voice to voice, each with its differently piercing note and, for commonality, just a hint of disconcert. . . . In \u003cb\u003eTheft\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eCarey has loosed several different voices at once. Each is full-throated and vividly conceived. . . . Enticing, arresting.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Carey is best known for his (wonderful) historical novels, but he’s in his glorious element when writing about the contemporary world, too. . . . He’s a consummate storyteller with a wicked eye and a tremendous ventriloquist’s gift.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic Monthly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “[Carey is a] brilliantly inventive writer. . . . [\u003cb\u003eTheft\u003c\/b\u003e] is an authentic love story about two brothers who can’t stand themselves, and can’t live without each other.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Full of compelling insights couched in fresh, sparkling prose, the aptly titled \u003cb\u003eTheft\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003emakes the right moves at the right time. It’s the rare novelistic gem that deserves to crack the divide between commercial success and critical acclaim.” —\u003ci\u003eSt. Louis Post-Dispatch\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “On the surface Carey’s [prose] pulls us forward in an atmosphere of antic noir. But the book turns out to be nearly as dense with themes, subplots, and embedded details as a more capacious and ambitious work like \u003cb\u003eOscar and Lucinda\u003c\/b\u003e. . . . Impressive.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Devilishly clever. . . . Features some of Carey’s best writing to date. . . . Carey provides a vivid and beautiful portrait of how art is actually made—and how its vibrations are felt.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Philadelphia Inquirer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A complete, compelling and satisfying tale.” —\u003ci\u003eMinneapolis Star Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A tale of fame, infatuation and murder, thrillingly rendered in the feisty and fearless prose for which Carey is renowned.” —\u003ci\u003eBloomberg.com\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “The plot of \u003cb\u003eTheft\u003c\/b\u003e is well crafted and engaging, but the real strength of the novel is in its characterizations. . . . It’s Carey’s genius that these two cranky misfits rule the day. . . . A wild and satisfying ride.” —\u003ci\u003eRocky Mountain News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “There are lots of novels that rhapsodize about great paintings, but this one makes you feel the tactile, unprettyfied glory of \u003ci\u003epainting\u003c\/i\u003e. . . . The prose almost throbs. [Carey] does this very hard thing—conveying the genius of one art form in another—so masterfully.” —\u003ci\u003eSalon\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Marvelously enjoyable, wonderful.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Times \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A screwball noir tale. . . . Carey is a loon from down under, a mad max who drives language and plot straight through the great barrier reef of the commonplace. . . . In this divine comedy of a novel, Carey gives his readers a rollicking lark of a story as well as a sense of eternity in a grain of sand.” —\u003ci\u003eFresh Air\u003c\/i\u003e, NPR\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Magnificent. . . . \u003cb\u003eTheft\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eis a novel that will get right up your nose. Carey has produced a humane, gloriously Australian book of grand passion, bad breath and high mischief. It is a rudely brilliant, infuriatingly beautiful, belligerently profane work of art.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A tale that falls somewhere between \u003cb\u003eThe Da Vinci Code\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003cb\u003eOf Mice and Men\u003c\/b\u003e. . . . Carey indulge[s] all his brilliant ventriloquism, creating a voice quite as vivid as the mesmerizing first person of Ned Kelly in the Booker-winning \u003cb\u003eTrue History of the Kelly Gang\u003c\/b\u003e.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Observer\u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A funny, gorgeous steal of a book.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Telegraph \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ePeter Carey is the author of nine novels, including the Booker Prize-winning \u003ci\u003eOscar and Lucinda\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eTrue History of the Kelly Gang\u003c\/i\u003e. Born in Australia in 1943, he now lives in New York City.I don't know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a   lot of shitty stuff did happen. It is certainly a love story but that   did not begin until midway through the shitty stuff, by which time I   had not only lost my eight-year-old son, but also my house and studio   in Sydney where I had once been about as famous as a painter could   expect in his own backyard. It was the year I should have got the   Order of Australia--why not!--look at who they give them to. Instead   my child was stolen from me and I was eviscerated by divorce lawyers   and gaoled for attempting to retrieve my own best work which had been   declared Marital Assets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Emerging from Long Bay Prison in the bleak spring of 1980, I learned   I was to be rushed immediately to northern New South Wales where,   although I would have almost no money to spend on myself, it was   thought that I might, if I could only cut down on my drinking, afford   to paint small works and care for Hugh, my damaged   two-hundred-and-twenty-pound brother.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My lawyers, dealers, collectors had all come together to save me.   They were so kind, so generous. I could hardly admit that I was   fucking sick of caring for Hugh, that I didn't want to leave Sydney   or cut down on drinking. Lacking the character to tell the truth I   permitted myself to set off on the road they had chosen for me. Two   hundred miles north of Sydney, at Taree, I began to cough blood into   a motel basin. Thank Christ, I thought, they can't make me do it now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But it was only pneumonia and I did not die after all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was my biggest collector, Jean-Paul Milan, who had designed the   plan wherein I would be the unpaid caretaker of a country property he   had been trying to sell for eighteen months. Jean-Paul was the   proprietor of a chain of nursing homes which were later investigated   by the Health Commission, but he also liked to paint and his   architect had made him a studio whose riverside wall opened like a   lube-bay door. The natural light, as he had so sweetly warned me,   even as he made his gift, was perhaps a little green, a \"fault\"   produced by the ancient casuarinas that lined the river. I might have   told him that this issue of natural light was bullshit, but again I   held my tongue. That first night out of gaol, at a miserably   wine-free dinner with Jean-Paul and his wife, I agreed that we had   tragically turned our backs on natural light, candlelight, starlight,   and it was true that the Kabuki had been superior in candlelight and   that the paintings of Manet were best seen by light of a dusty   window, but fuck it--my work would live or die in galleries and I   needed 240 reliable volts of alternating current to do my stuff. I   was now destined to live in a \"paradise\" where I could be sure of no   such thing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jean-Paul, having so generously given us his house, began immediately   to fret that I might somehow hurt it. Or perhaps the true alarmist   was his wife who had, long ago, caught me blowing my snotty nose into   her dinner napkin. In any case, it was only six mornings after we   first arrived in Bellingen that Jean-Paul burst into the house and   woke me. This was a nasty shock at almost every level, but I held my   tongue and made him coffee. Then for two hours I followed him around   the property as if I were his dog and every stupid thing he told me I   wrote down in my notebook, an old leather-bound volume that was as   precious to me as life itself. Here I had recorded every colour mix I   had made from the time of my so-called breakthrough show in 1971. It   was a treasure house, a diary, a record of decline and fall, a   history. Thistles, said Jean-Paul. I wrote \"thistles\" in my lovely   book. Mowing. I spelled it out. Fallen trees across the river. Stihl   chain saw. Grease nipples on the slasher. Then he was offended by the   tractor parked beneath the house. The woodpile was untidy--I set Hugh   to stack it neatly in the pattern Jean-Paul preferred. Finally my   patron and I arrived at the studio together. He removed his shoes as   if he meant to pray. I followed suit. He raised the big lube-bay door   to the river and stood for a long moment looking down at the Never   Never, talking--this is not made-up--about Monet's fucking Water   Lilies. He had very pretty feet, I had noticed them before, very   white and high-arched. He was in his mid-forties but his toes were   straight as a baby's.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Although he owned some twenty nursing homes, Jean-Paul was not   personally a great one for touching, but here in the studio, he laid   his hand on my forearm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"You'll be happy here, Butcher.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Yes.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He gazed around the long high room, then began to brush those rich,   perfect feet across the soft surface of the floor. If his eyes had   not been so moist he would have looked like an athlete preparing for   some sci-fi track event.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Coachwood,\" he said, \"isn't it something?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He meant the floor, and it was truly lovely, a washed pumice grey. It   was also a rare rain-forest timber, but who was I, a convicted   criminal, to argue ethics?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"How I envy you,\" he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And so it went, by which I mean that I was as docile as a big old   Labrador quietly farting by the fire. I could have begged him for   canvas, and he would have given it to me, but he would have wanted a   painting. It was that picture, the one I was not going to give him,   that I was thinking of right now. He didn't know it, but I still had   about twelve yards of cotton duck, that was two good pictures before   I was forced to use Masonite. I quietly sipped the nonalcoholic beer   he had brought me as a gift.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Good isn't it?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Like the real thing.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then, finally, the last instructions were issued, the promises all   given. I stood beneath the studio and watched him bounce his   rent-a-car across the cattle grid. He bottomed out as he hit the   bitumen, and then he was gone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Fifteen minutes later I was in the village of Bellingen, introducing   myself to the blokes at the Dairyman's Co-op. I bought some plywood,   a hammer, a carpenter's saw, two pounds of two-inch Sheetrock screws,   twenty 150W incandescent floods, five gallons of Dulux jet black, the   same of white, and all this, together with some odds and ends, I   charged to Jean-Paul's account. Then I went home to set up the studio.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Later everyone would get in a bloody uproar because I had supposedly   vandalised the coachwood with the Sheetrock screws, but I can't see   how else I could have laid the ply on top of it. Certainly, it could   not work the way it was. I was there to paint as everybody knew, and   the floor of a painter's studio should be like a site of sacrifice,   stabbed by staples, but also tended, swept, scrubbed, washed clean   after every encounter. I laid cheap grey linoleum on top of the ply   and coated it with linseed oil until it stank like a fresh pieta. But   still I could not work. Not yet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jean-Paul's prizewinning architect had designed a studio with a   high-arched roof and this he had tensioned with steel cables like the   strings on a bow. It was a bloody wonder of a thing, and I suspended   banks of incandescent floodlights from the cables which pretty much   eliminated both the elegance of his design and the green light coming   through the casuarinas. Even with these improvements it was hard to   imagine a worse place to make art. It was as buggy as a jungle and   the insects stuck to my Dulux paint, marking their death agonies with   concentric circles. And of course that big wide door was an open   invitation to the little fucks. I went back to the co-op and signed   for three of those blue-light insect zappers but that was like a   finger in the dyke. All around me was subtropical rain forest,   countless trees and insects as yet unnamed, unless by me--you cunt,   you little shit--who sabotaged the scrubbed and sanded flatness of my   hard-won work. In defense I tacked up ugly flywire but the sections   were not wide enough and in despair I had a silk curtain made on   credit--Velcro running down its sides and a great heavy sausage of   sand along its base. The curtain was a deep, deep blue, and the   sausage a rust brown. Now the little saboteurs fell into its sweaty   silky crotch and there they died in their thousands every night. I   swept them out when I cleaned my floor each morning, but some I saved   as life models, for no other reason than drawing is relaxing and I   would often, particularly when I had run out of wine, sit at my   dining table and slowly fill my notebook with careful grey renditions   of their lovely corpses. Sometimes my neighbour Dozy Boylan would   name them for me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By early December my brother Hugh and I were ensconced as the   caretakers and we were still there in high summer when my life began   its next interesting chapter. Lightning had struck the transformer up   on the Bellingen Road and so, once again, there was no good light to   work by, and I was paying for my patron's kindness by prettifying the   front paddock, hacking with a mattock at the thistles around the FOR   SALE sign.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    January is the hottest month in northern New South Wales, and also   the wettest. After three days of soaking rain the paddocks were   sodden and when I swung the mattock the mud was warm as shit between   my toes. Until this day the creek had been gin-clear, a rocky stream   rarely more than two feet deep, but the runoff from the saturated   earth had now transformed the peaceful stream into a tumescent beast:   yellow, turbulent, territorial, rapidly rising to twenty feet,   engulfing the wide floodplain of the back paddock and sucking at the   very top of the bank on whose edge the chaste studio was, sensibly   but not invulnerably, perched on high wooden poles. From here, ten   feet above the earth, one could walk out above the edge of the raging   river as on a wharf. Jean-Paul, when explaining the house to me, had   named this precarious platform \"the Skink\" referring to those little   Australian lizards who drop their tails when disaster strikes. I   wondered if he had noticed that the entire house was constructed on a   floodplain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We had not been in exile very long, six weeks or so, and I remember   the day because it was our first flood, also the day when Hugh had   arrived home from our neighbours with a Queensland heeler puppy   inside his coat. It was difficult enough to look after Hugh without   this added complication, not that he was always troublesome.   Sometimes he was so bloody smart, so coherent, at other times a   wailing gibbering fool. Sometimes he adored me, loudly, passionately,   like a whiskery bad-breathed child. But the next day or next minute I   would be the Leader of the Opposition and he would lay in wait   amongst the wild lantana, pounce, wrestle me violently into the mud,   or the river, or across the engorged wet-season zucchini. I did not   need a sweet puppy. I had Hugh the Poet and Hugh the Murderer, Hugh   the Idiot Savant, and he was heavier and stronger, and once he had me   down I could only control him by bending his little finger as if I   meant to snap it. We neither of us required a dog.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I severed the roots of perhaps a hundred thistles, split a little   ironbark, fired up the stove which heated the water for the Japanese   soaking tub and, having discovered that Hugh was asleep and the puppy   missing, I retreated out on to the Skink, watching the colours of the   river, listening to the boulders rolling over each other beneath the   Never Never's bruised and swollen skin. Most particularly, I observed   my neighbour's duck ride up and down the yellow flood whilst I felt   the platform quiver like a yacht mast tensing under thirty knots of   wind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Somewhere the puppy was barking. It must have been overstimulated by   the duck, perhaps imagined it was itself a duck--that seems quite   likely now I think of it. The rain had never once relented and my   shorts and T-shirt were soaked and I suddenly understood that if I   removed them I would feel a good deal more comfortable. So there I   was, uncharacteristically deaf to the puppy, squatting naked as a   hippy above the surging flood, a butcher, a butcher's son, surprised   to find myself 300 miles from Sydney and so unexpectedly happy in the   rain, and if I looked like a broad and hairy wombat, well so be it.   It was not that I was in a state of bliss, but I was, for a moment   anyway, free from my habitual agitation, the melancholy memory of my   son, the anger that I had to paint with fucking Dulux. I was very   nearly, almost, for sixty seconds, at peace, but then two things   happened at once and I have often thought that the first of them was   a kind of omen that I might well have paid attention to. It only took   a moment: it was the puppy, speeding past borne on the yellow tide.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Later, in New York, I would see a man jump in front of the Broadway   Local. There he was. Then he wasn't. It was impossible to believe   what I had seen. In the case of the dog, I don't know what I felt,   nothing as simple as pity. Incredulity, of course. Relief--no dog to   care for. Anger--that I would have to deal with Hugh's   ill-proportioned grief.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    With what plan in mind I do not know, I began struggling with my wet   clothes, and thus, accidentally, had a clear view, beneath the   studio, of my front gate where, some twenty yards beyond the cattle   grid, I saw the second thing: a black car, its headlights blazing,   sunk up to its axles in the mud.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There was no justifiable reason for me to be angry about potential   buyers except that the timing was bad and, fuck it, I did not like   them sticking their nose in my business or presuming to judge my   painting or my housekeeping. But I, the previously famous artist, was   now the caretaker so, having forced myself back into my cold and   unpleasantly resistant clothes, I slopped slowly through the mud to   the shed where I fired up the tractor.A Novel","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303355830501,"sku":"NP9780307276483","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307276483.jpg?v=1767742376","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/theft-isbn-9780307276483","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}