A Prankster's Peril

...Yet in the end none of them is a match for Bob McCorkle...

...Though perhaps few writers aspire to an imagination that borders on a multiple-personality disorder, it is safe to say that we all wish and work for the lucky spark of a character whose energies can barely be contained on the page...

...Since she never divests herself of that image, once Chubb finally regains his daughter it is an empty victory...

...The very idea of McCorkle seems to have released some raw, unrealized potential within Chubb, as if only from a character greater than life can great poetry spring...

...Walking along a narrow side street in Kuala Lumpur, she sees a white man working in a bicycle repair shop, clearly desperately poor, yet oddly enough reading from a volume of Rilke's poetry...

...Weis is humiliated when, after he publishes McCorkle's poetry, the hoax is revealed...

...But the reader willingly takes the risk ofbeing duped as well, because Chubb's unlikely story is impossible to resist...

...At first they appear to be separate, for the voice of this prose poem declares, "I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and that literature justifies my existence...

...then he is tried as a pornographer because one of the poems contains an ambiguous sexual reference...

...There are two Borges, we learn, one who lives an ordinary life and another who writes...

...Filled with the fire of literary discovery, as far as Wode-Douglass is concerned this poetry's power erases any stain of hoax...

...Nevertheless, she indulges Chubb, feeding and even clothing him, but not because of his own poetry, which is a wan disappointment...

...Pessoa's overpopulated literary world continues to be archived, and Pessoa himself will forever be bound to his creations: His tomb, in an alcove of the Mosteiro dos Geronimos outside Lisbon, is inscribed with a poem by the heteronym Ricardo Reis...

...Immediately intrigued, Wode-Douglass wants to leam more about the strange man and what holds him to this place...

...What she wants, after seeing a single page sample, is more of the work he wrote under the name McCorkle...

...Or do the poet, the invented poet and the poetry coexist in a form of unsettled symbiosis...

...Jorge Luis Borges, who has more than a little of Fernando Pessoa's spirit within him, provides an answer— well, sort of—in his marvelously telling "Borges and I," which limns the double nature of author and authorial persona...

...While Wode-Douglass listens to Chubb's ever expanding story, one can't help wondering: Has he found another Weis, another gullible editorto dupe, or is he baring his soul, recounting the wasted landscape his life has become by the events his prank set in motion...

...During McCorkle's flight and peripatetic travels, his nascent curiosity extends to the rest of the world—he learns, according to Chubb, six languages, "the name of everything that lived on the Malaysian earth," and "the holy books of Buddha and Mohammed...

...Whether Chubb's creation has come alive in his imagination or in the outside world is almost irrelevant...

...With each of these imagined poets possessed of his own history and particular style, a literary salon of competing voices thrived inside Pessoa...

...Chubb's own life will never be the same...

...Frankenstein stalking his monster, he spends years searching for McCorkle, the kidnapper of his daughter...

...The logic of McCorkle's terrible deed soon becomes clear: Chubb must lose his real child as a sacrifice for the creation of his literary persona, who in turn will gain that missing childhood by watching the infant girl grow up...

...It is Tina's belief in those legends that enables McCorkle to convince her Chubb is a malevolent wraith when he first shows up...

...Weis is found dead in his home, an apparent suicide...

...In addition, Chubb needs McCorkle's story, real or invented, for the poetry to transcend the page...

...The heretofore mild-mannered Chubb refuses to accept this exchange...

...Only after Pessoa's death did his friends realize the full extent of this alternate universe...

...Has Chubb's hoax become a strange, terrible birthing, or has a madman, with a surface resemblance to the doctored photo of the proletarian poet, embraced a longed-for potential identity...

...The hoax' debacle doesn't end there...

...As Carey's novel unfolds, his main characters vie for center stage—Sarah Wode-Douglass, John Slater, and naturally Christopher Chubb...

...Campos, for instance, wrote essays on Caeiro's work...

...After a long, wild chase through Malaysia, after four years of dead ends and close calls, Chubb finally locates his tormentor andhis daughter...

...That is, if you believe any of his improbable, heady, addictive account...

...and Alvaro do Campos, bisexual Dionysian...

...though she is advised against doing so by her companion, the English poet John Slater, who is well aware of Chubb's reputation as a literary prankster...

...he also recorded the late night discussions of these poets at a Lisbon bar, often making fun of Pessoa's sometimes obtuse contributions...

...The invented McCorkle suddenly appears, all flesh-and-blood, to torment Chubb...

...They discovered a trunk in his home filled with thousands of pages of poetry and prose ascribed to dozens of various poetic selves, as if he had given every hidden corner of himself a name...

...It is a tale of literary intrigue, of adventure and mystery, a narrative hall of mirrors with stories within stories within stories...

...What had been clever had now become true...

...Whatever the answer, this McCorkle is "a tethered beast, a wild man in a cage," who beats up policemen and steals Chubb's infant daughter because, he accuses Chubb, "You never gave me a childhood...

...Like Dr...

...McCorkle is filled with a personal magnetism and wildness Chubb does not possess, and by the end of the novel the reader suspects his creator needs him to exist, so that he can achieve the greatness he aspires to through the poems written in McCorkle's name...

...In double Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey's eighth novel, My Life as a Fake, a young Australian poet named Christopher Chubb makes the mistake of inventing the character of Bob McCorkle, a working-class poet...

...Invented or real, only seen as the subject of others' stories or as the object of others' desires, McCorkle is the mysterious, protean, shape-shifting core of My Life as a Fake...

...Who is this unlikely creature...

...Reviewed by Philip Graham Author, "Howto Read an Unwritten Language" In the early decades of the 20th century, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa created a trio of poetic alter egos, whom he dubbed heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, the poet of nature and critic of abstract categories...

...Authors live through such characters, setting these imaginary shards of themselves on an uncertain course through a narrative, because these characters can often become stranger, wilder than what their creators would ever allow themselves to be in life...

...This leads him to a tropical maze in Malaysia, where Sarah Wode-Douglass, a literary editor on a holiday and the book's narrator, first encounters Chubb...

...finally...

...HasMcCorklethen transcended his creator...

...Ricardo Reis, deist and formalist...

...Chubb also writes a sheaf of McCorkle's "posthumous" poetry in order to perpetrate a hoax on a selfimportant literary editor, David Weis...

...Alas, by this time the girl, now named Tina, has truly become McCorkle's child, accustomed as she is to isolated wanderings in the tropical forest and the local legends about spirits...

...Yet no one can say where such a fluid border is located, and ultimately the narrator is forced to confess, "I do not know which of us is writing this page...

...When he and McCorkle first meet, the possible madman reads aloud one of the parody poems ascribed to him, and Chubb is forced to confess that "this lunatic had somehow recast it without altering a word...

...The hoax succeeds far beyond Chubb's initial, meanspirited impulse...