Anthony Burgess
A Biography
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Interviewer: "On what occasions do you lie?" Anthony Burgess: "When I write, when I speak, when I sleep."
He was the last great modernist. Novelist, composer, librettist, essayist, semanticist, translator, critic, Anthony Burgess's versatility and erudition found expression in more than fifty books and dozens of musical compositions, from operas, choral works and song cycles to symphonies and concertos.
Here now is a kaleidoscope of a book--the culmination of twenty years of writing and research--about a man who remains best known for A Clockwork Orange, the source of Stanley Kubrick's ground breaking, mind bending and prescient film.
Tracking Burgess from Manchester to Malaya to Malta to Monte Carlo, Roger Lewis assesses Burgess's struggles and uncovers the web of truth and illusion about the writer's famous antic disposition. Burgess, the author argues, was just as much a literary confidence man and prankster as a consummate wordsmith.
Outrageously funny, honest and touching, Anthony Burgess explores the divisions that characterize its irascible subject and his darkly comic, bleakly beautiful world of fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lewis, who has chronicled the lives of Peter Sellers and Laurence Olivier, eschews the traditional chronological narrative for a highly stylized, psychodynamic reading of his subjects and their creative work. As it turns out, Anthony Burgess (1917 1994) is ripe for this sort of treatment. Best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, Burgess was extremely prolific but generally regarded as a great writer who never wrote a great book. Instead, he spread his talents thin (the author of scores of books, he was also a composer, translator and critic) and actively cultivated the myth of his own genius. By this account bombastic, egotistical and sexually eccentric, he responded to even the most profound tragedies of his life with a characteristic intellectual remove and what Lewis terms a "robotic" love of words. Lewis contends that Burgess (born John Anthony Burgess Wilson) was, in fact, several people at once, a "pathological liar" who lived in his books and experienced the world through a refracting set of identities. In perfect schizoid imitation, Lewis captures the Burgess/Wilson kaleidoscope with dramatic tangents, first-person interludes, endless cultural references, overly long footnotes and a charming lack of reverence. While at times Lewis's approach is frustratingly insular, a linear biography could not do this cryptic, difficult figure justice. 8 pages of b&w photos.
