Word: burgesses
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...climax of World Cup competition approached, it seemed that the momentous events strained conventional reporting techniques of factual description and analysis. What was required instead was the imaginative reach of a fiction writer. TIME asked British Novelist Anthony Burgess, from whose eclectic mind have sprung such novels as A Clockwork Orange and Enderby, to comment on the Cup. Burgess watched some of the early action in Germany. Here are some of his thoughts...
...stage for this performance is the Rome apartment where Burgess lives with his second wife Liana and their nine-year-old son Andrea, surrounded with the tools of his many trades -books, typewriters, recording equipment, even an electronic organ. The confidence, vitality and theatricality are typical. All his readers are familiar by now with the story of how he got his start as a novelist when doctors declared that he had only a year to live and he began writing like a man possessed, determined to build up an estate for his future widow...
Sacred Cow. The doctors were wrong, of course. But Burgess still works with the passionate speed of a condemned man. Right now he has three new novels in the works: an espionage thriller in a "super-James Bond vein," a biographical fiction based on his pianist father's musical career, and a novel devoted to Pope John XXIII, about whom Burgess, a strict English Catholic, is highly critical. Soon to be published is the third and concluding volume of the Enderby novels, the story of a poet who loses and then regains his creative gift, generally regarded...
...Burgess has strong, not to say brash, opinions on practically everything of importance and is not overly modest. "If I may say so, writing Napoleon Symphony was probably more difficult than writing a War and Peace, which can go on as long as it likes, and does." He kicks another sacred Russian cow in Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "The most swollen reputation of our day," he observes of the Nobel-prizewinning exile. "They say he is a great writer because he is a great...
Ironically, to Burgess, who carries high the torch of fiction's modernist tradition, the future of literary studies and serious reading looks bleak. "Nobody reads in the past any more," he grieves. "You can major in literature in America beginning with Hermann Hesse." (Burgess should know. He has spent most of the past five years teaching at Princeton and the City College of New York, though he now intends to devote himself full time to writing.) The author's exuberant pessimism extends to the course of democratic government, especially in his native England. His solution is for England...