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Theft
A Love Story
by Peter Carey
The acclaimed Australian author blends humor and suspense with this tale of two brothers, one mysterious woman, and an art heist.
Knopf, 272 pages
05/09/2006
$24.00
ISBN: 0307263711
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Daily Telegraph Ali Smith
A critique of both the art business and the business of love, this is a funny, gorgeous steal of a book.
Booklist Donna Seaman
Twice a Booker Prize winner, Carey creates a whole new world in each novel, and nearly a new language, so fresh and transfixing are the voices of his narrators. And yet he has his signal preoccupations, primary among them a fascination with the demonic side of creativity and questions of authenticity and fakery, concerns that come to the fore in this barbed, intriguing art caper. [15 Mar 2006, p.5]
Kirkus Reviews
The serpentine plot is a brain-squeezing beauty, cunningly elaborated through the juxtaposed first-person narrations of Butcher and Hugh (a possible nod to Australian master Patrick White's novel about emotionally conjoined twins, The Solid Mandala). But it's the author's mastery of details of artists' lives and the racy energy of his prose that make this edgy, irreverent, often hilariously profane novel soar. [1 Apr 2006, p.308]
Library Journal Lawrence Rungren
Sharply observed, well written, and acerbically witty, this book will only further Carey's reputation. [1 May 2006, p.76]
Publishers Weekly
Scenes in Australia, Japan and New York feature unique forms of fleecing, but setting and action are icing on the emotional core of Carey's newest masterwork. [20 Mar 2006, p.35]
The Guardian Patrick Ness
For let me be entirely clear about this: Theft: A Love Story is a novel that will get right up your nose. Carey has produced a humane, gloriously Australian book of grand passion, bad breath and high mischief. It is a rudely brilliant, infuriatingly beautiful, belligerently profane work of art.
The Observer Tim Adams
The love story of the title ostensibly refers to the heated romance between Butcher and Marlene, but it is the tortured bond between the brothers that is the heart of the book.
The Spectator Sebastian Smee
This is one of Carey's better books. Farfetched it may be, but sentence for sentence there are few writers alive who feel more real. [3 June 2006]
Houston Chronicle Charles Matthews
Freshly imagined, cunningly plotted, engagingly written, Theft is the kind of novel only an abundantly gifted artist, and one serious about his craft, could produce. Carey proves once again that he's about as good a novelist as we've got today.
London Review Of Books James Wood
One of the great familiar pleasures of his new novel is the way the language recklessly mixes different registers into a vivid democracy, now high and now low, but always interestingly rich.
New York Review Of Books Sarah Kerr
The most skillful effect in Theft is Carey's complex weaving of this harsh emotional legacy into the grown men's thoughts, behavior, and spasmodic jokes. It is as if anxiety and rage were a nose shape or a hair color passed on by the parents, living on in the children, recognizable, but with a difference.
The Economist
Written with terrific verbal energy and a snide, lashing sense of humour, Theft is a marvellous caper, a wicked little love story and a fine mockery of an industry that probably deserves it.
Los Angeles Times Jonathan Kirsch
The caper at the heart of Carey's tale is utterly absorbing, and the novel itself is richly ornamented with the tradecraft both of artist and art forger. [21 May 2006, p.R3]
Salon Laura Miller
The particular treasures offered by Theft are the novel's window into the crass, Byzantine workings of the art market and Michael's semidemonic, but palpably authentic, artistic passion. There are lots of novels that rhapsodize about great paintings, but this one makes you feel the tactile, unprettyfied glory of painting.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Ruth Scurr
His new novel is rough-hewn, full of abrupt one-liners, blunt images and block-capital obscenities. In a Tokyo restaurant, Butcher sees shouting cooks slice squid and hurl it "onto the metal plate where it leapt like something in my mother’s hell". The slapped-down image is devastating.
Washington Post Ron Charles
Between these two fraternal perspectives, one skewed by desire, the other by a brain disorder, Carey frames a story that shifts before our eyes -- maddeningly complex, hypnotically brilliant, entirely original.
Daily Telegraph Siddhartha Deb
Theft is a work of art that successfully reflects upon the conditions in which art is created, and one can't complain if it demands of the reader an ability to separate the slightly derivative skin from its pulsating, inimitably authentic, core.
Boston Globe Richard Eder
In Theft Carey has loosed several different voices at once. Each is full-throated and vividly conceived, but they don't quite blend; and the rather ragged effect is more a matter of talking at once than talking together.
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
The caper, despite all the continent-hopping, seems oddly slow-moving. Readers in search of a nimble thriller would do better elsewhere.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Carey is clearly having a blast with his material -- part art caper, part noir love story -- but he never quite brings the colorful Theft into focus.
San Francisco Chronicle Christine Thomas
Theft is unsettling and erratic, yet eventually develops a straightforward tale of the intrigue of art and love.
The New York Times Book Review Paul Gray
The best parts of Theft: A Love Story can be found in the lulls between its hectic events, when the novel truly sings -- both with Hugh's off-center but illuminating observations and Butcher's outraged complaints about the mendacity of the art dealers whose favor he is forced to curry.
The New Yorker John Updike
Peter Carey is a superb writer, whose prose is always active, and who infuses his characters, however eccentric, with a warmth that lets them live in our minds. But Theft is not a superb novel; there is something displaced at its heart. Its colorful means keep us at one remove from the central action, which, in retrospect, is perfidious and shocking.
The Onion A.V. Club Noel Murray
The book's best passages describe what's going through Michael's mind as he's slapping paint around, getting off on the application of color to color. It must be the same feeling Carey gets when he's stringing together sentences just for the pleasure of how the words sound in sequence.
 The average user rating for this book is 8.3 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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