AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: The Pianoplayers by Anthony Burgess ISBN: 0-685-19178-8 Publisher: Pocket Books Pub. Date: October, 1987 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $4.95

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Sounds Pretty Flimsy, No More Than a Whimsy
Comment: Anthony Burgess wrote this light novel about the same time he was doing the first volume of his autobiographical "Confessions" entitled Little Wilson and Big God. If you don't know the autobiography, maybe you can take The Pianoplayers as straight fiction. But I had read Little Wilson and Big God, not once but twice, by the time I picked up this novel in a outdoor bin in Sydney. And I was hopelessly aware that much of what I was reading was pure autobiography, loosely repackaged with scarcely a fictive figleaf to disguise it. In this case the figleaf is a change of sex. The narrator is Ellen Henshaw, an elderly woman born in the same place and year as Burgess. Henshaw's father, a dreamy, easygoing musician who plays piano accompaniment in fleapit movie theaters, is merely Burgess's dad pulled down a rung or two on the social scale. The first two-thirds of the book follows Ellen and her father on their picaresque social and sexual adventures, through bedsitters, cinemas, pubs and music halls in Manchester and Blackpool. Finally old Mr Henshaw collapses and dies after three weeks of a marathon performance at the piano keyboard. This brings the quasi-autobiographical section to an end. Ellen now goes back to school--first to a convent, then to a school for whores on the Continent. She tells us sketchily that she amasses a pile of money, returns to England, then gets back on The Game as an enterprising madam with a international string of brothels. Somehow a son appears in the story and has farcical adventures of his own, mostly involving an obese mother-in-law who dies on holiday in Italy and gets strapped like a piece of luggage to the roof of a Fiat. Burgess is very inventive with his heroine's career path--for example, she is lured from convent to courtesanarium by a high-class Belgian strumpet disguised as a nun--but he doesn't have the stamina to develop the characters' turns of fortune into something more than a series of whimsical digressions. I was irritated by the cavalier attitude of an author who seems to be asking me to care about characters who are presented as little more than cartoons.

Rating: 4
Summary: Read This
Comment: This book is wonderfully written by a master of the English language. He writes in the first person as a girl, a difficult task for any man, but if you didn't know who wrote it, you wouldn't be able to tell. The book is entertaining and very interesting. It is very different from "A Clockwork Orange," which is good because here you can see the author's depth and amazing ability.