Word: burgesses
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...Anthony Burgess. 242 pages. Knopf...
...epigraph for John Anthony Burgess Wilson's new novel is taken from a stage direction in Much Ado About Nothing: "Enter Prince, Leonato, Claudio and Jacke Wilson." It is appropriate because there is nothing in the field of fiction this Jack Wilson does not do. His prodigious career has already accounted for 15 novels, five books of criticism, hundreds of reviews and essays, all published since 1956, when Burgess...
Such notions are the stuff that paradox is made of-true grist for the comic novelist. In MF, Burgess takes off from a Levi-Strauss contention that a universal connection exists between answering conundrums and committing incest. According to this view, it was not by chance that Oedipus' unwitting incest occurred after he solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Among the Algonquin and Iroquois tribes, there is a legend of brother-and-sister love in which riddles are posed by talking owls. In a 1967 essay, Burgess marvels at this transcultural yoking. In MF, the old Algonquin yarn...
...Burgess leaves a plethora of clues as to his abstruse purposes-most of them in multilingual hints and guesses. The story starts in Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel. The man who encouraged Miles' interest in Sib Legeru, for instance, is one Professor Keteki-Sanskrit for riddle. While killing time with TV in his hotel room, Miles watches an old movie with Death and Transfiguration (by Richard Strauss) on the sound track...
Even for readers who have never read Levi-Strauss and think Algonquin legends are about Dorothy Parker, MF still works as a comic novel. It is not Burgess's best book because it is rather too schematic. The effort of dragging his mythic story into the 20th century has left the author with too little chance to flesh out his hero. Burgess is better remembered for characters like Enderby -decent, quirky men weathering the infirmities of the body and the indignities of the soul with awkward gallantry. By contrast, Miles Faber is a disappointment -nutty, knowledgeable, but finally...