Word: burgesses
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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. 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...
Paradoxically, however, the NRP must be affronted by the implications of all this black humor. Of course, Burgess has long since gone beyond the anti-philistinism in vogue a generation ago. The targets of his satire are not bankers or genteel folks or even working-class reactionaries. He occasionally slips and lambastes tourists, drug visionaries, religionists, or minor literati, but these stabs are part of that flashy knife play that is little more than a come-on. More seriously, he does not bewail alienation or urbanization or sentimentality or the impossibility of communication, except tangentially. He does not decry violence...
...Burgess is indiscriminate in his attacks. A sort of antihumanist, he lays his cudgel evenly on the whole of his bizarre, passively embraced cosmos and on all its characters. The most conspicuous villains of Enderby are women-womankind, randomly represented by a number of oppressively corporeal seductresses. The tragedy of Enderby's life is the upbringing his stepmother has given him. She has stamped her foster-son with her filthy habits and enforced his life-long retreat to the lavatory. From her come the whole slew of Enderby's neuroticisms, from his fear (cropping up in the author's other...
...hero is not a simple misogynist, not a fully accredited human being with but one blank space in his account. Burgess's male characters, with the exception of the cynical betrayer, Rawcliffe, whose death is the most effective episide in the book, are as static and object-like as his women. The characters are exhibits of no more than equal rank with the strange locales and cunning twists of fate Burgess marshals for the reader's diversion...