Description:

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is dense, funny, and moving, an unprecedented work of the imagination, a modern world as packed with incident and character as a Victorian novel, an allegory that is most remarkable for the thread of love and loyalty that runs through its richly imagined tapestry. If you are not a citizen of Voorstand, you may not be familiar with the strange case of Tristan Smith and his illegal appropriation of Bruder Mouse. Even if you are a citizen of faraway Efica, you will only have heard rumours about the juggling, the somersaulting, the Burro Plasse tunnel, and the motel on the border . . . Here, for the first time, is the truth about Tristan Smith. This fully annotated edition follows Tristan's career from his birth in the Republic of Efica in the year 371 to the present day. Severely afflicted, doomed never to be taller than three foot six, Tristan Smith faces death and danger from the first moment of his energetic and ambitious life. ### From Publishers Weekly Australian novelist Carey presents an extravagantly picaresque tale of a vaguely futuristic and very bizarre world. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. ### From Library Journal Carey creates a fully realized parallel universe in this unusual novel set in Efica, an island nation under the political and cultural domination of the larger Voorstand. Part Bildungsroman, part political allegory, and part meditation on identity, this novel traces the first 23 years of Tristan, its eponymous narrator, a hideously deformed dwarf and son of actress Felicity Smith (the head of a radical theater company and champion of Efican culture). In the novel's first half, Tristan tells of his early adventures with the company, culminating with Felicity's fatal foray into politics. In the second, he recounts his later travels in Voorstand in search of Bill Millefleur, an actor he believes to be his father. This inventive, multilayered work should only add to Carey's already considerable reputation. Highly recommended. *Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.* Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.