Bob Carr, long-time premier of New South Wales until he retired in 2005, is profiled in "The Australian" by Rosemary Neill as his new book,
My Reading Life: Adventures in the World of Books, is published.
Carr has little time for most contemporary fiction. Much of it, he writes, "seems trivial, gimmicky, forced". Sipping a flat white, he tells Review: "I can't understand why anyone would want to read from the Booker prize list if they haven't read The Brothers Karamazov or The Illiad or every word of Tolstoy ... I think one chapter of War and Peace is worth everything at the front end of a modern bookshop; every contemporary work of fiction propped up in the window of a modern bookshop."Some of his choices of "best" author in a genre will raise some eyebrows.As if still attuned to how this will play in hard-core Labor electorates, he adds: "People might say that's snobbery." But Carr declares it's those who "look down and dismiss as weird or eccentric any focus on enduring culture, I think they're the snobs". Still, it's odd that someone who took such pleasure in presiding over the NSW Premier's Literary Awards should be so dismissive of modern fiction.
