- Hardcover: 140 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; First Edition edition (6 Aug 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0747555001
- ISBN-13: 978-0747555001
- Product Dimensions: 17.8 x 11.8 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
91,041 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11 in Books > Travel & Holiday > Countries & Regions > Australia & New Zealand > Australia > Sydney
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
With admirable enterprise, Bloomsbury books have asked a number of top writers to describe the city they love most; 30 Days in Sydney represents Peter Carey's turn with a unique take on the Aussie metropolis.
Subtitled "a wildly distorted account" it is pretty much that: an oblique, poignant, entertaining and rather candid look at the city. Using his prize-winning novelist's eye for telling detail, and the objectivity of the relative outsider (Carey has spent the last decade in New York, and he hails from Melbourne), the author shows that Sydney is not just about sun, sports, gay sex and Sydney Harbour Bridge. It's also about endangered wildlife, painful history, militant agnosticism and, above all, a wilful, dogged, brave, funny, cantankerous citizenry. As Carey trots around town we get to meet a few of these hard-bitten "diggers"; their individuality and orneriness are deftly sketched.
If there is a criticism of the book it's that it's all too brief. 240 smallish pages is a diminutive canvas on which to paint a portrait of such a diversely sprawling place. One might, for instance, have wished to know more about multicultural Sydney, and perhaps a bit more about the cockatoos and koalas which yet inhabit the city's remoter reaches. But this is still an agreeable pocket companion for anyone intending a trip to the Big City Down Under. --Sean Thomas
Woman's Journal, 1st September 2001
"...gets right under the skin of the city to give the reader a unique take on the metropolis and its people."
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A refreshingly different look at Sydney,
By
This review is from: 30 Days in Sydney: The Writer and the City (The writer & the city) (Hardcover)
I bought this book because I was a bit homesick and there aren't that many good books that are about real life in Sydney. I wasn't disappointed but if you want a straight history or travelogue about Sydney then this isn't the book for you. If you want something a bit different, yes a "wildly distorted account", then this is the book for you. This might be a short and wild ride through Sydney but it also begins to show how Sydney is and how diverse it is under the surface. On top of that it's also an entertaining read!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Carey's catharsis of concerns,
By Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: 30 Days in Sydney: The Writer and the City (The writer & the city) (Hardcover)
Any attempt to girdle a city within literature is doomed by the complexity and expanse of the topic. Carey delays this admission until the end, although by then his feelings are clear. Living and writing in New York City, only a deep inland residence could give him greater setting for contrast. His comparison with his current home is limited to the cramped quarters he endures there. Yet this limited contrast imparts the theme and import of this personal summary. Little of this book is about Australia's key city. Instead, the majority of Carey's essays here describe the Harbour, the Blue Mountains, the Pacific Coast, the Bridge and rivers. The characters are a melange of his personal friends and historical figures. There is a mystical episode on the Harbour Bridge and a passing critique of the CBD [Central Business District] and the values of those working there. The theme remains that the City is but one location in a region of contrasts. No other city is placed so uniquely. Perhaps no-one is better suited to attempt this unique task.Many cities rejoice in their history, but in this, too, Sydney is special. Founded as a convict colony, it grew into a major Pacific port. Survival was a struggle with poor soil, vagaries of rain and wind and the presence of the Aborigine population - issues that urbanisation hides but cannot eliminate. Sensing its importance early, Sydney girted the Harbour with forts, something Carey lightly applauds when old forts become new parks. Carey conveys the sense of struggle, but time has transformed equal starving of convicts and guards to ideals of social equality - so long as that society is white, he reminds us. His "distorted view" imparts his dissenting view on relations with displaced Aborigines, among other topics. However booksellers classify this work, it's not a travel advisory. Tourists will be unlikely to join the Sydney to Hobart race. Even more unlikely when they read Carey's account of the disaster of 1998. Nor will the casual visitor find themselves in a capsized racing skiff in the teeth of ten metre waves and forty knot winds. If you do visit, be careful hiking in mountains. If your visit occurs in the Southern Hemispheric summer, be extra cautious with matches or campfires. What can happen if you aren't Carey imparts with stunning clarity. Having lost his own house to fire, a telephone dialogue with a friend fighting to save one is a gripping read. Carey's many awards are well deserved. His descriptive writing skills and characterisation are well demonstrated in this book. It's no matter if these are real people, mixtures of many into one or wholly invented. Their own stories are from real life and deserve attention. Carey snags your attention from the first page and you give it willingly to the rest of the book. An essay string that may be enjoyed by anyone, this book provides entertainment, education and excitement. Try it and see. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
4.0 out of 5 stars
A wildly distorted account,
By Philip Spires "Author of Mission, an African ... (La Nucia, Spain) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
This review is from: 30 Days in Sydney: The Writer and the City (The writer & the city) (Hardcover)
Peter Carey's 30 Days In Sydney claims to present a wildly distorted account of a writer's return to a city he knows well. After ten years in New York, the author spends a month in the city he left behind and he records the experience. It's not at all distorted, except interestingly via an essential personal perspective. It's more than a travelogue, less than a memoir, certainly not a guidebook. The form is intriguing. It could pass as a commonplace book, the merely fleshed out notes of an individual's visit to his own past. And the form works well.The idea, it seems, is to communicate a feel for a place. The result is a collected experience where the personal rubs shoulders with the historical, where memory meets geography, where the past is partly lived again through recollection and the lives of others who themselves have moved on. And all of this takes place in less than sixty thousand words. Peter Carey's aim of using the ancient elements, fire, air, earth and water, as a thread to bind his impressions, however, simply does not work. The idea appears and then seems to be forgotten for some time. The earth is surely special in Australia, quite unlike anywhere else. And water is everywhere in Sydney, whose harbour is surely one of the world's most beautiful places. Fire certainly formed - and continues to form - this landscape: no Australian needs to be reminded of this. Air, however, did not seem to have its own angle, apart form the author having arrived by plane. Looking back now, perhaps the thread was there, despite the fact that at the time it seemed something of a complication. Themes apart, 30 Days In Sydney is a delightful read because of the characters that Peter Carey meets, depicts and describes, both the living and the dead, the contemporary and the historical. The mix is unique. The rawness is abrasive, but the sophistication alongside is always breathtaking. Sydney is the kind of city where multiple cultures coexist. In that it is not unique. But it is also the largest city of a nation that has recently rediscovered an aboriginal identity that is being apologetically sanctified. It's a city where the bar at the opera probably has a poker machine. In Manly, the multi-class seaside suburb, a beautiful person with headphones and roller blades can flash past the open door of an amusement arcade while the police swing band, live in the open air, all in uniform and wearing shades, plays a Glen Miller selection. It's a place where you can be pushed off the sidewalk by a redneck right outside the most utterly twee of art galleries. Such contrasts are all there in Peter Carey's book.
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