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Summary
Summary
From the two-time Booker Prize-winning author: an irrepressibly funny new novel set in early-nineteenth-century America.
Olivier--an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville--is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English engraver. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be joined by an enigmatic one-armed marquis.
When Olivier sets sail for the nascent United States--ostensibly to make a study of the penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolution--Parrot will be there, too: as spy for the marquis, and as protector, foe, and foil for Olivier.
As the narrative shifts between Parrot and Olivier--their adventures in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands--a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold. And with their story, Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy with dazzling inventiveness, and with all the richness and surprise of characterization, story, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer.
Author Notes
Peter Carey was born on May 7, 1943 in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia. His first two books, The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979), were short story collections. His first novel, Bliss, was published in 1982. At the time he was balancing his writing career with the operation of an advertising agency in Sydney, and his books were not generally known outside of Australia. He began to receive international attention when Illywhacker was published in 1985. He won the Booker Prize in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. His other works include The Tax Inspector, Parrot and Olivier in America, and The Chemistry of Tears. He also won the Miles Franklin Award three times. In 2015 he made the Australian Book Designers Association Award shortlist for his title Amnesia. This title also made the 2015 Prime Minister's Literary Awards shortlist.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The eminently talented Carey (Theft) has the gift of engaging ventriloquism, and having already channeled the voices of Dickens's Jack Maggs and the Australian folk hero/master thief Ned Kelly, he now inhabits Olivier-Jean-Baptist de Clarel de Barfleur, a fictionalized version of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose noble parents are aghast at his involvement in the events surrounding Napoleon's return and the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X. To remove him from danger, they send him to America, where priggish snob Olivier inspires Carey's humor during his self-centered adventures in New York, New England, and Philadelphia. Olivier can't shake his aristocratic disdain of raw-mannered, money-obsessed Americans-until he falls for a Connecticut beauty. More lovable is Parrot, aka John Larrit, who survives Australia's penal colony only to be pressed into traveling with Olivier as servant and secret spy for Olivier's mother. Though their relationship begins in mutual hatred, it evolves into affectionate comradeship as they experience the alien social and cultural milieus of the New World. Richly atmospheric, this wonderful novel is picaresque and Dickensian, with humor and insight injected into an accurately rendered period of French and American history. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey's transfixing novels are at once sharply funny and profoundly resonant. They are shaped by his sharp insight into the conflict between an individual's will and circumstances, hence his fascination with historical figures. In his latest imaginative and commanding tale, Carey presents a brilliant and sly variation on the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the indelible Democracy in America. High-strung, smart, and snobbish, Olivier is sent to America by his parents, who barely avoided the guillotine during the French Revolution, to escape the reignited Terror. A long-suffering Englishman called Parrot, the orphaned son of a printer, is charged with protecting Olivier (whom he dubs Lord Migraine ), but he has other concerns, especially an intrepid painter named Mathilde. A master of the dual narrative, Carey has fastidious yet observant Olivier (his take on Americans and rocking chairs is priceless) and shrewd and articulate Parrot take turns telling their astonishing stories in a picaresque adventure spiked with revelations personal and societal. Echoes of Tocqueville's masterpiece are matched by intimations of Mark Twain, while Parrot mirrors James John Audubon. Remarkably fluent in history, Carey is not beholden to his sources but, rather, empowered to create a thrillingly fresh and incisive drama of extraordinary personalities set during a time of world-altering vision and action.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A view of Broadway in the 1830s. BY THOMAS MALLON PETER CAREY'S 11th novel is announced by its publisher as "an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville," a figure perhaps a bit cerebral for one of this author's brass-band burlesques of literature and history. But "Parrot and Olivier in America" grabs its subject and marches down Main Street playing full out, provoking a reader's delighted applause and - as is often the case with this exuberant novelist - a small measure of exasperation. Carey's Olivier de Garmont is born, like the author of "Democracy in America," into a family of Norman nobles in 1805. His grandfather - again, like the real Tocqueville's - has lost his head to the guillotine; Olivier's parents are lucky to have escaped it. The family makes a small comeback when the Bourbons are restored to the throne, but in 1831, a year after the July Revolution, Olivier, a rising young lawyer, decides to push off to America. He declares himself to be in an "impossible position" politically, since he's one of those "liberal modern men" who are nevertheless "nobles still" and thus blameworthy. Aside from all else, his mother thinks it's wise for him to leave the country. And so arrangements are made for him to conduct a study of America's penal system for the new French regime he so dislikes. The real Tocqueville traveled to the United States for the same limited, original purpose, accompanied by Gustave de Beaumont, a social equal only three years older than himself. Olivier, by contrast, boards the Havre (Tocqueville's very ship) with an entirely different sort of companion. Parrot, his feisty English secretary, is almost 50 and has the kind of dizzying, Dickensian résumé that often qualifies a character for employment in one of Peter Carey's books. To simplify things, vastly: Parrot is a former printer's devil who long ago learned engraving from the mysterious Mr. Watkins, who would seem to have perished at the fiery end of a forgery scheme involving Parrot's own father. At 12, Parrot passed into the control of the Marquis de Tilbot, a one-armed counter-revolutionary Frenchman whom the boy saved from starvation on the English moors. (Tilbot is, it should be noted, the author's latest improvisation on Dickens's Abel Magwitch, whom Carey transformed into Jack Maggs, the eponymous hero of his crackerjack 1998 novel.) Tilbot carried young Parrot off to Australia and years later brought him back to re-royaled Paris, where he became the older man's servant and spy. It is in this capacity that Parrot goes off to America, to look after and report on Olivier for the young lawyer's mother, the Countess de Garmont, with whom Tilbot is in love. The real Tocqueville is described by his biographer Hugh Brogan as having been "cross-grained, refined, severely intellectual, private." Carey doubles the worst of these ingrethents to create, in Olivier, a pompous, febrile, tantrum-prone twit, a master Parrot refers to as "Lord Migraine." Olivier is abstractly liberal but consumingly elitist; his servant boils with ambition and resentment. A socialist and unbeliever, Parrot imagines his own mind to be "a mighty garden wild with weeds," and himself a man "subject to the laws of Newton but not to those of kings." He is being cruelly transplanted to a new world whose democratic opportunities he cannot seize: "I read Tom Paine by candlelight, but for 18 hours a day I was a vassal." He is, however, able to bring along his volatile mistress, Mathilde, a portrait artist who hates the aristocrats she flatters in paint. Tormented by the hours of the voyage that Olivier spends sitting for her, Parrot tosses the resulting canvas over the Havre's starboard side. Both men first discover America among their fellow passengers. The most confident of these is Mr. Peek, president of the Bank of New York, who urges Olivier to "play the democrat" and stop offending Yankee sensibilities by sending Parrot below deck. 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(When it comes to such parallel observations, Carey acknowledges that scholars "will detect, squirreled away among the thatch of sentences, distinctive threads, necklaces of words that were clearly made by the great man himself.") Even before disembarking in New York, Olivier has decided to expand his project beyond penology and write a book about all things American. He dictates a letter to his mother, through Parrot, telling her that "when the wave of democracy breaks over our heads, it will be best we know how to bend it to our ends rather than be broken by its weight." He sees Americans as "caterpillars" forever shedding one existence for another. Their snobbishness and democratic affectations, their wish to be admired, their enthusiasm for clubs and associations, and their tendency toward religious fervor all enter his gaze. Soon enough he is even using and italicizing their expressions: "I would leave for my vacation by stagecoach." Tocqueville took an English wife, but Carey gives Olivier an American romance with Miss Amelia Godefroy. When she becomes his lens for looking at the New World, Olivier's findings - which can be as tart as the real-life judgments in Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic Manners of the Americans" - are beguiled into something more sympathetic. Parrot all but rolls his eyes over his employer's rhapsody to a Connecticut town meeting they attend with Amelia: "He was aglow, his cheeks red, wreathed in smiles. He wiped the corner of his eye. He declared, good grief, he had come home." Like most of Carey's inventive, maximalist entertainments, "Parrot and Olivier" is replete with expressed feeling, if too wittily contrived for actual passion. The story is told in the alternating voices of its two main characters, and it's hard to say where the emotional focus finally lies. Master and servant bump along through fits of contempt and pity and occasional affection, without ever really fusing or fully breaking apart. Olivier's belief that Parrot has made him "the object of a strange and savage love" is an aristocrat's delusion. Parrot's teeming emotions are always finding someone and something else to spill onto, and the novel keeps throwing fresh excitement and frustration his way. No regular reader of Carey will be surprised when Mr. Watkins, the engraver last seen almost 40 years earlier while on fire, shows up in New York; or when Parrot begins helping him assemble and sell a collection of his work called "The Birds of America." Sentence for sentence, Carey's writing remains matchlessly robust. Sailors cling "to the rigging like soft fruit in a storm," while inside a dark parlor old ladies sit "wetting their hairy chins with stout." But as the book's bravura paragraphs grow into chapters, the author seems unable to decide whether it's "Democracy in America" or "Martin Chuzzlewit" or, once more, "Great Expectations" he'd like to inflate and transform. The local units of invention rarely disappoint, but if Tocqueville were to survey the book's overall imaginative structure, he might recommend a stronger sort of federalism to the enormous literary talent presiding here. In Olivier, we meet a pompous, febrile, tantrum-prone version of the real-life figure who inspired him. Thomas Mallon's novels include "Fellow Travelers" and "Bandbox." His most recent book is "Yours Ever: People and Their Letters."
Bookseller Publisher Review
Peter Carey is one of Australias finest writers, and a two-time winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize, so a new novel is always a major event. In recent years he has been more prolific than ever, with Parrot and Olivier in America following hard on the heels of His Illegal Self and Theft before it. After those two novels, and My Life as a Fake, which were all set in the 20th-century, Carey has made a return to the 19th-century in his new work. It s a time period that has been fruitful for him, with both of his Man Booker Prize-winning novels, Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang, being set in that century. Parrot and Olivier in America is a fictionalised 'reimagining of Alexis de Tocquevilles journey to America, which formed the basis of his hugely influential work Democracy in America. In Carey s novel he has been transformed into Olivier de Garmont, a somewhat feckless young French aristocrat whose parents narrowly avoided the guillotine during the revolution. In order to save Olivier from the political situation in 1830s France, his mother ships him off to America on the pretext of studying American prisons, a job which he comes to take quite seriously. Accompanying him is John Larrit, or 'Parrot', an English servant who is rather reluctant to serve, and who has a fascinating history of his own. As he has done in his previous few novels, Carey makes good use of alternating points of view, with the chapters being narrated by Olivier and Parrot in turn. This technique gives all of the advantages of a first person narrator, including having a distinctive voice', without being restricted by a single perspective on events. Carey populates the novel with a number of other distinctive characters, including the one-armed Marquis de Tilbot, the forger Algernon Watkins who aspires to produce the best book of birds the world has ever seen (Carey is obviously inspired by John James Audubon here), and Martine, an artist s assistant whose work surpasses her master s. Carey is at the peak of his powers as a novelist and Parrot and Olivier in America fits into a long tradition of picaresque tales about journeying to America, including Daniel Defoe s Moll Flanders and John Barths The Sot-Weed Factor. Fans of Carey s work wont need much encouragement to pick this up, but it should have widespread appeal in Australia and overseas. Blair Mahoney teaches English, literature and philosophy at Melbourne High School and is the author of Poetry Reloaded, a textbook for secondary students
Guardian Review
"It is not good," states Alexis de Tocqueville in the quote that begins Carey's 11th novel, "to announce every truth." Carey takes the bones of the French aristocrat and thinker's famous 19th-century trip to America and builds an extravagant fiction upon it, following bumbling, allergy-dogged nobleman Olivier and his stubborn servant Parrot on a clever and comical bromance around cities, farms and prisons. The pair, as per the rules of the genre, begin in a state of mutual loathing. Parrot, whose itinerant childhood is turned upside down by an angry peer and a one-armed Frenchman, reads Tom Paine by candlelight and resents his puffed-up companion, while impetuous Olivier, accustomed to viewing servants as devices first and people a very distant second, finds Parrot hard to think of at all. Carey throws in hideous burns, love, fake Australian lakes and New York real estate. It's a riotous ride, a tale that squirms and shouts, with moments of brilliant, measured eloquence that leave the reader with some rather profound thoughts. - James Smart It is not good," states Alexis de Tocqueville in the quote that begins Carey's 11th novel, "to announce every truth." Carey takes the bones of the French aristocrat and thinker's famous 19th-century trip to America and builds an extravagant fiction upon it, following bumbling, allergy-dogged nobleman Olivier and his stubborn servant Parrot... - James Smart.
Kirkus Review
A New World historical novel from Carey, the two-time Australian-born winner of the Man Booker prize. We start in the Old World. When the nobleman Olivier de Garmont is born in 1805, post-revolutionary France is still volatile. Olivier lost a grandfather to the guillotine. His parents remain in exile until the Bourbon Restoration. Olivier's liberal sentiments endanger him during the next revolution (July 1830), and his ultra-royalist mother decides he should be sent out of harm's way, to America. She acts through her confidant, the one-armed Marquis de Tilbot, and his middle-aged servant, known as Parrot, a most undeferential Englishman. Parrot's story: As a boy in England, he was rescued by de Tilbot after his father's wrongful arrest for forging banknotes, sent to Australia where he married and had a child, then was plucked away again by the Marquis. (All this dribbles out in flashbacks.) Olivier is drugged and put aboard a vessel to New York, together with Parrot. Now the nobleman has transplantation in common with his thrice-uprooted new servant. His cover story in America will be that he is investigating their prison system, as did another French nobleman, Alexis de Tocqueville, the inspiration for this novel. Carey's nobleman is a playful distortion of de Tocqueville, for Olivier is a nincompoop, myopic both literally and figuratively, with zero interest in prisons and slow to realize the resourcefulness of his savvy Parrot. Carey exploits this comic material only fitfully, though he cooks up some adventures for the odd couple and a romance for Olivier, who falls for the daughter of a Connecticut landowner ("I had arrived, quite unexpectedly, in Paradise.") Their starry-eyed courtship distracts attention from a more interesting development: the budding friendship between the principals ("in a democracyboth parties know that the servant may at any moment become the master"). Quirky and erudite, but the payoff in human-interest terms is meager. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont is French nobility, son of survivors of the French Revolution. Olivier has had every privilege and is acutely aware of his relative social position. Imagine his surprise and discomfort when he is banished, for his own safety, to newly emerging democratic America. Son of an itinerant English printer, with a colorful and varied past, Parrot proves an unlikely companion. Parrot is sent to accompany Olivier as his servant and secretary, with the secret mission of reporting Olivier's activities back to his mother in France. The story alternates between Parrot and Olivier, who narrate from their widely different points of view. Featuring well-developed and multifaceted characters (the novel was inspired by the life of Alexis de Tocqueville), this book is rife with humorous details and turns of phrase, and the language is sophisticated (readers might want to have a dictionary handy). Verdict Written by a two-time Booker Prize winner, this engaging book will be particularly appreciated by readers interested in early 19th-century American history, the French aristocracy, and emerging democracy. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/09.]-Sarah Conrad Weisman, Corning Community Coll. Lib., NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Olivier i I had no doubt that something cruel and catastrophic had happened before I was even born, yet the comte and comtesse, my parents, would not tell me what it was. As a result my organ of curiosity was made irritable and I grew into the most restless and unhealthy creature imaginable--slight, pale, always climbing, prying into every drain and attic of the Château de Barfleur. But consider this: Given the ferocity of my investigations, is it not half queer I did not come across my uncle's célérifère? Perhaps the célérifère was common knowledge in your own family. In mine it was, like everything, a mystery. This clumsy wooden bicycle, constructed by my uncle Astolphe de Barfleur, was only brought to light when a pair of itinerant slaters glimpsed it strapped to the rafters. Why it should be strapped, I do not know, nor can I imagine why my uncle--for I assume it was he--had used two leather dog collars to do the job. It is my nature to imagine a tragedy--that loyal pets have died for instance--but perhaps the dog collars were simply what my uncle had at hand. In any case, it was typical of the riddles trapped inside the Château de Berfleur. At least it was not me who found it and it makes my pulse race, even now, to imagine how my mother might have reacted if I had. Her upsets were never predictable. As for her maternal passions, these were not conventionally expressed, although I relished those occasions, by no means infrequent, when she feared that I would die. It is recorded that, in the year of 1809, she called the doctor on fifty-three occasions. Twenty years later she would still be taking the most outlandish steps to save my life. ... My childhood was neither blessed nor tainted by the célérifère, and I would not have mentioned it at all, except--here it is before us now. Typically, the Austrian draftsman fails to suggest the three dimensions. However: Could there be a vehicle more appropriate for the task I have so recklessly set myself, one that you, by-the-by, have supported by taking this volume in your hands? That is, you have agreed to be transported to my childhood where it will be proven, or if not proven then strongly suggested, that the very shape of my head, my particular phrenology, the volume of my lungs, was determined by unknown pressures brought to bear in the years before my birth. So let us believe that a grotesque and antique bicycle has been made available to us, its wooden frame in the form of a horse, and of course if we are to approach my home this way, we must be prepared to push my uncle's hobby across fallen branches, through the spinneys. It is almost useless in the rough ground of the woods, where I and the Abbé de La Londe, my beloved Bébé, shot so many hundreds of larks and sparrows that I bruised my little shoulder blue. "Careful Olivier dear, do be careful." We can ignore nose bleeding for the time being, although to be realistic the blood can be anticipated soon enough--spectacular spurts, splendid gushes--my body being always too thin-walled a container for the passions coursing through its veins, but as we are making up our adventure let us assume there is no blood, no compresses, no leeches, no wild gallops to drag the doctor from his breakfast. And so we readers can leave the silky treacherous Seine and cross the rough woodlands and enter the path between the linden trees, and I, Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont, a noble of Myopia, am free to speed like Mercury while pointing out the blurry vegetable garden on the left, the smudgy watercolor of orchard on the right. Here is the ordure of the village road across which I can go sailing, skidding, blind as a bat, through the open gates of the Château de Barfleur. Hello Jacques, hello Gustave, Odile. I am home. On the right, just inside, is Papa's courthouse where he conducts the marriages of young peasants, thus saving them military service and early death in Napoleon's army. It does not need to be said that we are not for Bonaparte, and my papa leaves the intrigues for others. We live a quiet life--he says. In Normandy, in exile , he also says. My mother says the same thing, but more bitterly. Only in our architecture might you glimpse signs of the powerful familial trauma. We live a quiet life, but our courtyard resembles a battlefield, its ancient austerity insulted by a sea of trenches, fortifications, red mud, white sand, gray flagstones, and fifty-four forsythias with their roots bound up in balls of hessian. In order that the courtyard should reach its proper glory, the Austrian architect has been installed in the Blue Room with his drawing boards and pencils. You may glimpse this uppity creature as we pass. I have omitted mention of the most serious defect of my uncle's vehicle--the lack of steering. There are more faults besides, but who could really care? The two-wheeled célérifère was one of those dazzling machines that are initially mocked for their impracticality until, all in a great rush, like an Italian footman falling down a staircase, they arrive in front of us, unavoidably real and extraordinarily useful. The years before 1805, when I was first delivered to my mother's breast, constituted an age of inventions of great beauty and great terror--and I was very soon aware of all of this without knowing exactly what the beauty or the terror were. What I understood was drawn solely from what we call the symbolic aggregate : that is, the confluence of the secrets, the disturbing flavor of my mother's milk, my own breathing, the truly horrible and unrelenting lowing of the condemned cattle which, particularly on winter afternoons, at that hour when the servants have once more failed to light the lanterns, distressed me beyond belief. But hundreds of words have been spent and it is surely time to enter that château, rolling quietly on our two wheels between two tall blue doors where, having turned sharply right, we shall be catapulted along the entire length of the long high gallery, traveling so fast that we will be shrieking and will have just sufficient time to notice, on the left, the conceited architect and his slender fair-haired assistant. On the right--look quickly--are six high windows, each presenting the unsettling turmoil of the courtyard, and the gates, outside which the peasants and their beasts are constantly dropping straw and fecal matter. You might also observe, between each window, a portrait of a Garmont or a Barfleur or a Clarel, a line which stretches so far back in time that should my father, in the darkest days of the Revolution, have attempted to burn all the letters and documents that would have linked him irrevocably to these noble privileges and perils, he would have seen his papers rise from the courtyard bonfire still alive, four hundred years of history become like burning crows, lifted by wings of flame, a plague of them, rising into a cold turquoise sky I was not born to see. But today is bright and sunny. The long gallery is a racetrack, paved with marble, and we swish toward that low dark door, the little oratory where Maman often spends her mornings praying. But my mother is not praying, so we must carry our machine to visit her. That anyone would choose oak for such a device beggars belief, but my uncle was clearly an artist of a type. Now on these endless stairs I feel the slow drag of my breath like a rat-tail file inside my throat. This is no fun, sir, but do not be alarmed. I might be a slight boy with sloping shoulders and fine arms, but my blood is cold and strong, and I will swim a river and shoot a bird and carry the célérifère to the second floor where I will present to you the cloaked blindfolded figure on the chaise, my mother, the Comtesse de Garmont. Poor Maman. See how she suffers, her face gaunt, glowing in the gloom. In her youth she was never ill. In Paris she was a beauty, but Paris has been taken from her. She has her own grand house on the rue Saint-Dominique, but my father is a cautious man and we are in exile in the country. My mother is in mourning for Paris, although sometimes you might imagine her a penitent. Has she sinned? Who would tell me if she had? Her clothes are both somber and loose-fitting as is appropriate for a religious woman. Her life is a kind of holy suffering existing on a plane above her disappointing child. I also am sick, but it is in no sense the same. I am, as I often declare myself, a wretched beast . Behold, the dreadful little creature--his head under a towel, engulfed in steam, and the good Bébé, who was as often my nurse as my tutor and confessor, sitting patiently at my side, his big hand on my narrow back while I gasped for life so long and hard that I would--still in the throes of crisis --fall asleep and wake with my nose scalded in the basin, my lungs like fish in a pail, grasping what they could. After how many choking nights was I still awake to witness the pale light of dawn lifting the dew-wet poplar leaves from the inky waters of the night, to hear the cawing of the crows, the antic gargoyle torments of country life? I knew I would be cured in Paris. In Paris I would be happy. It was the Abbé de La Londe's contrary opinion that Paris was a pit of vile miasmas and that the country air was good for me. He should have had me at my Catullus and my Cicero but instead he would drag me, muskets at the ready, into what we called the Bottom Hundred where we would occupy ourselves shooting doves and thrush, and Bébé would play beater and groundsman and priest. "You're a splendid little marksman," Bébé would say, jogging to collect our plunder. " Quam sagaciter puer telum conicit! " I translated. He never learned I was shortsighted. I so wished to please him I shot things I could not see. My mother would wish me to address him as vous and l'Abbé , but such was his character that he would be Bébé until the day he died. I was a strange small creature for him to love. He was a strong and handsome man, with snow-white hair and shrewd eyes easily moved to sympathy. He had raised my father and now I trusted myself entire to him, his big liver-spotted hands, his patient manner, the smell of Virginian tobacco which stained the shoulder of his cassock, and filled me with the atoms of America twenty years before I breathed its air. "Come young man," he would say. "Come, it's a beautiful day-- Decorus est dies. " And the hail would be likely flailing your back raw and he would marvel, not at the cruel pummeling, but at the miracle of ice. Or if not the ice, then the wind--blowing so violently it seemed the North Sea itself was pushing up the Seine and would wash away the wall that separated the river from the bain. The meek would not swim, but Bébé made sure I was not meek. He would be splashing in the deep end of the bain , naked as a broken statue--"Come on Great Olivier." If I became--against all that God intended for me--a powerful swimmer, it was not because of the damaging teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but because of this good priest and my desire to please him. I would do anything for him, even drown myself. It was because of him that I was continually drawn away from the awful atmosphere of my childhood home, and if I spent too many nights in the company of doctors and leeches, I knew, in spite of myself, the sensual pleasures of the seasons, the good red dirt drying out my tender hands. And of course I exaggerate. I lived at the Château de Barfleur for sixteen years and my mother was not always to be found lying in her pigeonhole with the wet sheet across her eyes. There was, above my father's locked desk, a large and lovely pencil portrait of my maman, as light as the dream of a child that was never to be born. Her nose here was perhaps a little too narrow, a trifle severe, but there was such true vitality in the likeness. She showed a clear forehead, a frank expression, inquiring eyes that directly engaged the viewer, and not only here, but elsewhere--for there would be many nights in my childhood when she would rise up from her bed, dress herself in all her loveliness, and welcome our old friends, not those so recently and swiftly elevated, but nobles of the robe and sword. To stand in the courtyard on these evenings with all the grand coaches out of sight behind the stables, to see the fuzzy moon and the watery clouds scudding above Normandy, was to find oneself transported back to a vanished time, and one would approach one's grand front door, not speeding on a bicycle, but with a steady slippered tread and, on entering, smell, not dirt or cobwebs, but the fine powder on the men's wigs, the lovely perfumes on the ladies' breasts, the extraordinary palette of the ancien régime , such pinks and greens, gorgeous silks and satins whose colors rose and fell among the folds and melted into the candled night, and on these occasions my mother was the most luminous among the beautiful. Yet her true beauty--evanescent, fluttering, deeper and more grained than in the pencil portrait--did not reveal itself until the audience of liveried servants had been sent away. Then the curtains were drawn and my father made the coffee himself and served his peers carefully, one by one, and my mother, whose voice in her sickbed was thin as paper, began to sing: A troubadour of Béarn, His eyes filled with tears . . . At this moment she was not less formal in her manner. Her slender hands lay simply on her lap, and it was to God Himself she chose to reveal her strong contralto voice. I have often enough, indiscreetly it seems now, publicly recalled my mother's singing of "Troubadour Béarnais," and as a result that story has gained a dull protective varnish like a ceramic captive in a museum which has been inquired of too often by the overly familiar. So it is that any tutoyering bourgeois and his wife can know the Comtesse de Garmont sang about the dead king and cried, but nothing would ever reveal to them Olivier de Garmont's fearful astonishment at his mother's emotions, and--God forgive me--I was jealous of the passion she so wantonly displayed, this vault of historic feeling she had hidden from me. Now, when I must remain politely at attention beside my father's chair, I had to conceal my emotion while she gave away a pleasure that was rightly mine. Our guests cried and I experienced a violent repugnance at this private act carried out in public view. His eyes filled with tears, Sang to his mountain people This alarming refrain: Louis, son of Henri, Is captive in Paris. When she had finished, when our friends remained solemnly still, I walked across the wide rug to stand beside her chair and very quietly, like a scorpion, I pinched her arm. Of course she was astonished, but what I remember most particularly is my wild and wicked pleasure of transgression. She widened her eyes, but did not cry out. Instead she tossed her head and gave me, below those welling eyes, a contemptuous smile. I then walked, very coolly, to my bed. I had expected I would weep when I shut my door behind me. Indeed, I tried to, but it did not come out right. These were strange overexcited feelings but they were not, it seemed, of the sort that would produce tears. These were of a different order, completely new, perhaps more like those one would expect in an older boy in whose half-ignorant being the sap of life is rising. They seemed like they might be emotions ignited by sinful thoughts, but they were not. What I had smelled in that song, in that room full of nobles, was the distilled essence of the Château de Barfleur which was no less than the obscenity and horror of the French Revolution as it was visited on my family. Of this monstrous truth no honest word had ever been spoken in my hearing. My mother would now punish me for pinching her. She would be cold, so much the better. Now I would discover what had made this smell. I would go through her bureau drawers when she was praying. I would take the key to the library. I examined the papers in my father's desk drawers. I climbed on chairs. I sought out the dark, the forbidden, the corners of the château where the atmosphere was somehow most dangerous and soiled, well beyond the proprieties of the library, beyond the dry safe wine cellar, through a dark low square portal, into that low limitless dirty dark space where the spiderwebs caught fire in the candlelight. I found nothing--or nothing but dread which mixed with the dust on my hands and made me feel quite ill. However, there is no doubt that Silices si levas scorpiones tandem invenies--if you lift enough rocks, you will finally discover a nest of scorpions, or some pale translucent thing that has been bred to live in a cesspit or the fires of a forge. And I do not mean the letters a certain monsieur had written to my mother which I wish I had never seen. It was, rather, beside the forge that I discovered the truth in some humdrum little parcels. They had waited for me in the smoky gloom and I could have opened them any day I wished. Even a four-year-old Olivier might have reached them; the shelf was so low that our blacksmith used it to lean his tools against. One naturally assumed these parcels to be the legacy of a long-dead gardener--dried seeds, say, or sage or thyme carefully wrapped for a season some Jacques or Claude had never lived to see. By the time I pushed my snotty nose against them, which was a very long time after the night I pinched my mother, they still exuded a distinct but confusing smell. Was it a good smell? Was it a bad smell? Clearly I did not know. Not even Montaigne, being mostly concerned with the smell of women and food, is prepared to touch on this. He ignores the lower orders of mold and fungus, death and blood, all of which might have served him better than his ridiculous assertion that the sweat of great men--he mentions Alexander the Great--exhaled a sweet odor. Excerpted from Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.