Two-time Booker Prize-winner Carey (“The True History of the Kelly Gang”) has called Olivier an “improvisation” on de Tocqueville, and history buffs should have a great deal of fun with his extended riff. Millard Fillmore is just funny to say.)īut there is his fictional alter ego, a Gallic Felix Unger to his British servant (and spy) John Larrit’s Oscar Madison in Peter Carey’s energetically intelligent new novel, Parrot and Olivier in America.(Although the pampered, asthmatic, peevish Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur makes Felix look like Rocky Balboa.) Ben Franklin could totally have starred in a picaresque. ( Teddy Roosevelt is easy to imagine in a road movie. American high school students probably wouldn’t single out the author of “Democracy in America” as an especially humorous historical figure. Alexis de Tocqueville doesn’t seem a likely candidate for a buddy comedy.
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