Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: You'Ve Had Your Time: Second Part of the Confessions by Anthony Burgess ISBN: 0-8021-1405-9 Publisher: Pub Group West Pub. Date: 01 March, 1991 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: Finding Lost Time
Comment: I stumbled across Burgess's autobiography in a mail-order catalogue of remaindered books. _You've Had Your Time_ cost half as much as the shipping and handling, and was read with the kind of joy and guilt one feels when finding a stray twenty-dollar bill in an empty parking lot.
What struck me about Burgess on Burgess is his delight in words---utilitarian words, pretty words, obscene words, latinates, any combination thereof (among his favorites: micturate). He called his art a craft, and loved to show the clockwork behind prose-tricks, how even the most magical books depend heavily on sleight-of-hand. Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of his autobiography is how sketchy it is on the author's life and how detailed it is on words. For him, at least, the two are inseparable.
Anthony Burgess, aspiring composer, is told at 35 that he has an inoperable brain tumor---he will die within a year. He cranks a sheet of paper into a typewriter. Jump a few decades ahead. In 1989 we find him reflecting on Joyce's anniversary, on conversations in Saxon with Borges, on Kubrick's version of _A Clockwork Orange_, and on a bitter scene from a childhood he can't quite call his own.
He wrote over thirty novels, and also adapted, translated, and commented on a dizzying array of subjects. He was very, very funny. He was at his funniest when writing on his life. And yet there is this terrible, self-inflicted sense of failure when he looks back: The last line in his book is both defiant and defeated---time is creeping up on him, he says, and his attitude is not that of a complacent man of letters, but rather that of someone with an awful lot of unfinished business.
Here's the punchline: In-between the completion of the memoir and his death he wrote an additional six books. The last one, a novel in verse, has just come out. Burgess cheated death at the beginning of his literary career and has done so again.
 |
Title: Little Wilson & Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (Vintage Classics) by Burgess ISBN: 0099437058 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: December, 2002 |
 |
Title: One Man's Chorus: The Uncollected Writings by Anthony Burgess, Ben Forkner ISBN: 078670568X Publisher: Pub Group West Pub. Date: 01 December, 1998 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
 |
Title: Little Wilson and Big God: The First Part of the Confession by Anthony Burgess ISBN: 0802132405 Publisher: Grove/Atlantic Pub. Date: April, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
