PEELING by Peter Carey

This is  revelation, of a man where it always seems to be late afternoon, and a woman who is there because she is there, not for any prior cause, and she makes or collects white dolls, and likes oysters, and he teaches her how to eat barley sugar; this man makes ends meet without a job now, but like him I may misremember what I am told about him and this story is slowly divested of its carapace revealing my memory of nothing. She is slowly divested of the layers given her by fiction and my reading of it. Halfway through the striptease my reading of it indicates she becomes a man too mean to be me. Mean in spirit and the meanest possible in flesh. It’s as if I have rewritten it simply by reviewing it. Peeling it back. Her barley sugar breasts were once like white oysters.

“White, which has become a fashionable colour of late, has no special appeal to her: it is simply that it says nothing,…”

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My other review of Peter Carey: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/14/report-on-the-shadow-industry-1994-by-peter-carey/

My review of THE FOLDING MAN by Brian Howell: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/20/the-folding-man-by-brian-howell/

My review of SOLID GEOMETRY by Ian McEwan: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/23/solid-geometry-ian-mcewan/