Word: burgesses
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NAPOLEON SYMPHONY by ANTHONY BURGESS 365 pages. Knopf...
Anyone who read A Clockwork Orange before having his eyeballs poached by Stanley Kubrick's movie version knows Anthony Burgess as a writer with a hearty appetite for the cosmic bite into such subjects as original sin, good v. evil and spiritual sloth-not to mention the need for individual moral choice. He is also intimidatingly prolific and versatile...
...Burgess novel is frequently an embarrassment of riches, a kind of conspicuous consumption of exotic plot thickeners, linguistic games, disturbing tragicomedy, Manichaean trampoline acts and Christian and mythological symbolism. Thematically speaking, anything goes-as Burgess demonstrated three years ago in MF, a novel of contemporary incest based on an Algonquin Indian myth. In his latest offering, Napoleon Symphony, the author, who is also a serious composer, has reached for everything from kazoos to pipe organs. The result is a mock epic about the career of Napoleon Bonaparte that sometimes reads like Dickens, sometimes like Tennyson and Wordsworth, with an occasional...
...capers and preens through Bloom's transformations-a Circe's hog, transvestite, martyr, hero of the people-with an air of dignified amazement. However, this is a muted Mostel, and somehow he is not enough. Whether the problem lies in trying to capture Joyce onstage or in Burgess Meredith's direction, there are long moments of curious lifelessness, a kind of listless anarchy, the stage business often as flyaway as the Joycean allusions...
...earlier editions. There is Arnold Toynbee on Julius Caesar and leading American Catholic Theologian John L. McKenzie on Roman Catholicism, English Embryologist Sir Gavin de Beer on evolution and Carl Sagan (see BOOKS) on the planets and extraterrestrial life. The late Sir Tyrone Guthrie writes about theater, Anthony Burgess examines the novel, Alan Lomax discusses singing, and Barnaby Conrad summarizes bullfighting. Although more than half the scholarly contributors are American or English, the authors come from a total of 131 countries. "A.S.A.," who writes on Mecca, for example, is Saudi Arabian Geographer Ass'ad Sulaiman Abdo...