Word: burgess
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Unlike James Joyce, who refused to read Freud, or Dylan, who could not listen to Sgt. Pepper, novelist-essayist-poet and Joyce disciple Anthony Burgess has read everything. The prolific Englishman, author of thirteen books since 1949, has thrown it all into his latest tale of a lonely antihero dragging his dyspeptic way through the exoticisms of the Great Mundane. Burgess's greatest creation is Enderby, a wheezing, farting, belching bachelor poet who writes in the lavatory of his filthy flat. Enderby is a Mad Magazine version of Leopold Bloom; he sentimentally feeds gulls and innocently offends all the local...
...Burgess's ingenious plot is couched in some of the most high-powered and imaginative language (including Russian, Arabic, Gothic, Latin, Spanish, and dialects) since Joyce. (A Clockwork Orange, Burgess's best-known work, is written in a hybrid argot of his own invention.) But Joyce had many voices and no one style; Burgess, for all the richness of his repertoire, writes in a monotone that is no more varied than his fixed point of view. Cleverness ("She breathed on him (though a young lady should not eat, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions."), hyperbole ("his insides...
ENDERBY, by Anthony Burgess. In this retouching of an earlier portrait of the artist as a middle-aged gasbag, the gifted English novelist combines the elements of entertainment and enlightenment with uncommon artistry...
ENDERBY, by Anthony Burgess. A jaunty account of the taming of a poet, demonstrating with scurrilous charm that an artist is a man who expresses for all men their unbuttoned true selves...
Enderby, an expanded, enriched version of a 1963 work, Inside Mr. Enderby, comes as close as any of Burgess' novels (A Clockwork Orange, Tremor of Intent) to serving both his favorite lightweight tone and one of his favorite heavyweight meanings. Here, with the most offhand, scurrilous charm, he illustrates as well as preaches that the artist is the man who expresses for all men their unbuttoned true selves...