30 Days in Sydney
A Wildly Distorted Account
by Peter Carey
Overview
From the Publisher
After living in New York for ten years novelist Peter Carey returned home to Sydney with the idea of capturing its ebullient character via the four elements. 'I would never seek to define Manhattan by asking my New York friends for stories of Earth and Air and Fire and Water,' he writes, 'but that is exactly what was in my mind as I walked through immigration at Kingsford Smith International Airport.' But Carey's friends turn out to be anarchic characters each of whom has his own very individual way of story-telling.
My thoughts
I have been liberated! After several years of thinking I had to finish a book once I started it, just in case it got better or just in case I wasn't getting it, I am finally able to put down a book that simply isn't holding my interest! What freedom! Thank you, Nancy Pearl!
I purchased this book because (1) it's about Sydney, a city near and dear to my heart and, (2) it's written by Peter Carey, whose book True History of the Kelly Gang I really enjoyed.
I started out enjoying this book and then part way through, page 110 actually, I lost interest. The choppy writing style wasn't appealing to me and the stories lost interest. The insertion of foul language didn't seem necessary either.
Pity, because I really want to like this book. The story of Eternity is precious.
Favorite Passage
I first saw Eternity when I was a kid, he told me as he rolled his second cigarette. I came out of my house and discovered this chalk calligraphy on the footpath. No one ever wrote anything on the streets in those days. I thought, what's that? I didn't think about what it meant. I didn't analyse it. It was just beautiful and mysterious.
For years and years no one knew who wrote this word, said Martin. It would just spring up overnight. We now know the writer's name was Arthur Stace. We know he was a very little bloke, just five feet three inches tall, with wispy white hair and he went off to the First World War as a stretcher-bearer. Later he was a 'cockatoo', a look-out for his sisters who ran a brothel. Then he became an alcoholic. By the 1930s, when he walked into a church in Pyrmont, he was drinking methylated spirits.
...Eternity, the preacher said, I would like to shout the word Eternity through the streets of Sydney.
And that was it, said Martin. Arthur's brain just went BANG. He staggered out of the church in tears. In the street he reached in his pocket and there he found a piece of chalk. Who knows how it got there? He knelt, and wrote Eternity on the footpath.
According to the story, he could hardly write his own name until this moment, but now he found his hand forming this perfect copperplate. That was sign enough...he wrote his message as much as fifty times a day.
