Oscar and Lucinda Free

Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date. For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now. Javascript is not enabled in your browser. Enabling JavaScript in your browser will allow you to experience all the features of our site. Learn how to enable JavaScript on your browser. Man Booker Prize. NOOK Book. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in Oscar and Lucinda narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback. He is the author of a collection of stories Oscar and Lucinda five novels. Date of Birth:. These bishops were, for the most part, bishops of Grafton. Once there was a bishop of Wollongong, travelling through. There was also a canon, and various other visiting or relieving reverends. My mother crooked her finger as she Oscar and Lucinda up her teacup. She would not tell the bishops that my great-grandfather's dog-collar was an act of rebellion. Oscar and Lucinda would look at a Victorian clergyman. They would see the ramrod back, the tight lips, the pinched nose, the long stretched neck and never once, Oscar and Lucinda can bet, guess that this was caused by Oscar Hopkins holding his breath, trying to stay still for two minutes when normally—what a fidgeter—he could not manage a tenth of a second without scratching his ankle or crossing his leg. This was obvious to me, but I said nothing. I sat, tense, my hands locked underneath my thighs. In a moment the Bishop would ignore our big noses and many other pieces of contradictory evidence, and remark on our resemblance to this pioneer clergyman. We lined up: my mother, my brother, me, my sister. We had red hair, long thin necks like twisted rubber bands. My mother was pleased to imagine she looked like the photograph. I would rather have looked like my father. He was not like us at all. He was short, broad-faced, pigeon-chested. He had crinkled eyes and crooked teeth. He laughed and farted. He was a cunning spin bowler. He could roll a cigarette with one hand. He was not like us, and when my mother told the visiting Bishop the story of how Oscar transported the little church of St John's to Bellingen, my father would peel a Oscar and Lucinda with his broad fingernail and look out through the windows to where the great physical monument to his marriage, the Prince Rupert's Glassworks-the roof painted bright red then, in the s-sal high above the Bellinger River. My mother told the story of the church in a way that always embarrassed me. There was an excess of emotion in her style. There was something false. We 'must have all known it, but we never spoke about it. I could not have named it anyway. My father made jokes about many things, but never about this. My father was jealous of that church, although if you could see it now, it is hard to imagine why. It sits on a patch of flood-prone land beside Sweet Water Creek at Gleniffer—a tiny weatherboard Oscar and Lucinda with a corrugated iron roof. For fifty years it was painted various shades of brown, Oscar and Lucinda then, Oscar and Lucindait was painted a harsh lime green. Now it has gone chalky and sits in that generous valley like something on which lichen has grown. It tucks in underneath the long line of casuarinas Oscar and Lucinda mark the course of the river. I was away at the lime, but it seems unlikely to me. These are the same people who now want St John's removed on a low-loader. They want it taken to Bellingen to be used as a Sunday school. My father, for one, would have been appreciative. He was, as I said, jealous of it. He did not like my mother's proprietorial attitude to it. Perhaps if the church had been in the town of Bellingen itself it would have been different. But Gleniffer is ten Oscar and Lucinda away. She would not hear of attending service in Bellingen. They must motor out to Gleniffer. During the war they used their petrol ration just going to church. We were all baptized there, confirmed there. I was married there. When my father died he was carried ten miles to Gleniffer for the funeral service, and then ten miles back into town to be buried. My father did not get drunk, but once, after drinking two beers, he told me that my mother walked around the perimeter of St John's like a dog pissing around a fence. But only once did he ever show my mother the intensity of his feelings. I had seen it sink, its beam still shining through the Oscar and Lucinda fascinating sea of urine and faeces. My father did not, as he had on an earlier occasion, come out and retrieve it. So when the lights went off in the storm the following night, he had no torch to examine the fuse-box. Lightning was striking all around us. The phone was giving small pathetic rings in response to strikes further along the line. We thought our fuses were blown by a backsurge in the power system. Oscar and Lucinda father took a candle out on the veranda. The candle blew out. When he came back into the house he did not have the fuse with Oscar and Lucinda. We were sitting in silence at the kitchen table. My father said: "Where is the fuse-wire? I sat next to my mother. My sister was sixteen; she sat next to me. My brother was fourteen; he sat next to my sister. People described her as a tall woman. She was not. She was five foot six, but she had an iron will and a suspicious nature and this, combined with her power as an employer in the glassworks, was a tall combination. I could smell the smoking candle. Although my father held this candle, I knew he could not smell it. He had no sense of smell at all. I waited for the next flash of lightning. This was somehow connected with the loss Oscar and Lucinda his sense of smell. He syringed his nasal passages with salt water every morning. Often he would ask: "Does it smell? Lightning sheeted the kitchen. She had Oscar and Lucinda head tilted in the air in that disdainful pose which, in the family Oscar and Lucinda, was said to resemble a camel. I felt very tense. I was the one who had helped my mother make this Advent wreath. There had been no holly or ivy, but I had found camphor laurel leaves, which are shiny and green. I knew she had not only used the fuse-wire but had taken the wire netting from my brother's rabbit hutches. The rabbits were, at this moment in shoe boxes in the linen press. She did not think that they would piddle. It did not occur to her. My father lit the candle. He did not approach the table. He did not go back towards the door. He stood in the middle of the Oscar and Lucinda. My father did not speak like this. He liked life to be quiet. Even when he was dying, he tried to do it in a way that would not upset my mother. Of course it was St John's. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey: | : Books

Look Oscar and Lucinda. For only on that sprawling continent—a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms—could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Oscar and Lucinda become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only Oscar and Lucinda prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a Oscar and Lucinda expedition to transport a glass church across Oscar and Lucinda Outback. Peter Carey is the author of thirteen previous novels and is a two-time winner of the Booker Prize. The reader emerges. He is funny, humane, and profound. Carey nears the summit occupied by Borges and Pynchon and a very few others. When you buy a book, we donate a book. Sign in. Halloween Books for Kids. Read An Excerpt. Nov 11, ISBN Add to Cart. Also available from:. Mar 23, ISBN Available from:. Paperback —. Also in Vintage International. Also by Peter Carey. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. The Eye in the Door. The Ten Thousand Things. Maria Dermout. Setting Free the Bears. High Dive. Jonathan Lee. Europe Central. William T. The Radetzky March. Carmen Laforet. Fellow Travelers. Thomas Mallon. Billy Bathgate. The Heat of the Day. Elizabeth Bowen. Cold Mountain. Charles Frazier. A Million Nightingales. Susan Straight. O Pioneers! Oscar and Lucinda Cather. The Accidental. The Great Gatsby. Scott Fitzgerald. Oscar and Lucinda Short History of a Small Place. Valerie Martin. The Ghost Road. The Conservationist. Nadine Gordimer. English Passengers. Matthew Kneale. America America. Falling Angels. Tracy Chevalier. To the North. Suzanne Rindell. Flight of Dreams. Ariel Lawhon. The Little Book. Selden Edwards. Joseph and His Brothers. The Splendor Before the Dark. Margaret George. Contact us about speaking engagements with Peter Carey. Related Articles. Looking for More Great Reads? Download Hi Res. LitFlash The eBooks you want at the lowest prices. Read it Forward Read it first. Pass it on! Stay in Touch Sign up. We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later. Become a Member Start earning points for buying books! Oscar and Lucinda - Wikipedia

Their lives form a love story of enchantment and wicked wit. When we say two people were born for each other, that sometimes means their lives would have been impossible with anyone else. That appears to be the case with Oscar and Lucinda. Their story, told Oscar and Lucinda a long flashback, begins with Oscar as the shy son of a stern English minister, and Lucinda as the strong-willed girl raised on a ranch in the Australian outback. We see them formed by their early lives; he studies for the ministry, she inherits a glassworks and becomes obsessed with glass, and they meet during an ocean voyage from England to Australia. They meet, indeed, because they gamble. Oscar Oscar and Lucinda Fiennes has been introduced to horse racing while studying to be a clergyman, and is transformed by the notion that someone will actually pay him money for predicting which horse will cross the line first. Lucinda Cate Blanchett loves cards. Soon they're playing clandestine card games onboard ship, and Oscar is as thrilled by her descriptions of gambling as another man might be by tales of sexual adventures. Reading it, I was swept up by the humor of the situation, and by the passion of the two gamblers. For Oscar, gambling is not a sin but an embrace of the rules of chance that govern the entire universe: "We bet that there is a God--we bet our life on it! Once ashore in Sydney, where Oscar finds rooms with a pious church couple, they continue to meet to play cards, and when discovered, they're defiant. Oscar decides he Oscar and Lucinda fit into ordinary society. Lucinda says it is no matter. Even now they are not in love; it is gambling that holds them together, and Oscar believes Lucinda fancies another Oscar and Lucinda who has gone off Oscar and Lucinda convert the outback. That gives him his great idea: Lucinda's glassworks will fabricate a glass cathedral, and Oscar will superintend the process of floating it upriver to the remote settlement. For madness, this matches the obsession in Herzog's " Fitzcarraldo " to move a steamship across a strip of dry land. For inspiration, it seems divine--especially since they make a bet on it. Reading the novel, I pictured the glass cathedral as Oscar and Lucinda and vast, but of course it is a smaller church, one suitable for a growing congregation, and the photography showing its stately river progress is somehow funny and Oscar and Lucinda at the same time. Here there is a dry wit, generated between the well-balanced performances of Fiennes and Blanchett, who seem quietly delighted to be playing two such rich characters. The film's photography, by Geoffrey Simpsonbegins with standard, lush 19th century period evocations of landscape and sky, but then subtly grows more insistent on the quirky character of early Sydney, and then cuts loose altogether from the everyday in the final sequences involving the Oscar and Lucinda church. In many period films, we are always aware that we're watching the Oscar and Lucinda Here Oscar and Lucinda seem ahead of us, filled with freshness and invention, and only the narration by Geoffrey Rush of " Shine " reminds us that they were, incredibly, someone's grandparents. Oscar is shy and painfully sincere, Lucinda has evaded her century's strictures on women by finding a private passion, and they would both agree, I believe, that people who worship in glass churches should not throw stones. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in Inhe won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Ralph Fiennes as Oscar Hopkins. Cate Blanchett as Lucinda Leplastrier. Ciaran Hinds as The Rev. Dennis Hasset. Tom Wilkinson as Hugh Stratton. Richard Roxburgh as Mr. Clive Russell as Theophilus. Reviews Oscar and Lucinda. Roger Ebert January 23, Now streaming on:. Powered by JustWatch. Now playing. The Lie Nick Allen. The Doorman Simon Abrams. Chicuarotes Carlos Aguilar. Film Credits. Latest blog posts.