Carey makes much of Olivier’s myopia, and it seems obvious enough that America, and thus the future, belongs to Parrot, not to Olivier. Narrator Humphrey Bower perfectly juggles a variety of complex characters and accents in Careys historical novel. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, and their picaresque travels together and apart - in love and politics, prisons and the. Though he warms to the American experiment-he, too, is moved by the Fourth of July event-the warmth is intermittent, banked with superiority. Olivier is prissier and more snobbish than Tocqueville was. Meanwhile, Parrot grows up in working-class England, where his father works for a printer, and Parrot spends his days taking care of Watkins, an elderly engraver and counterfeiter.
Born to members of the French aristocracy, Olivier grows up a strange, unhealthy, and eternally curious boy. In the course of this transformation, the two men have many American adventures, some of them loyal to the narrative of Tocqueville and Beaumont’s journey.but Carey’s departures from the Tocqueville biography are as interesting as his loyalties. Beel Jill M Parrot Della Jean Abrahams Laura Getty Anita Turlington I-Yuan Chiang Samuel Sennott Victor Shoup Konstantinosn N. As the novel opens, Olivier recalls his childhood. Born on different sides of history, their lives will be brought together by their travels in America.
Parrot the son of an itinerant printer who always wanted to be an artist but has ended up a servant. Parrot & Olivier in America is a delicious, sprockety contraption, a comic historical picaresque that takes as its creative origin Tocqueville and Beaumont’s 1831 journey … Carey’s story is in what eighteenth-century novelists called the ‘Cervantick’ tradition, which means that this Quixote and Panza must first be at loggerheads, then at ease, and finally in love with each other, and that the master must finally need the servant’s help. Olivier is an aristocrat, the traumatized child of survivors of the French Revolution.
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