Word: levying
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bike culture burgeoned, the Angels' legend became as grimy as their beards, Levi's and leather vests. In 1965 they tore up an Oakland peace rally. Four years later came Altamont. Commissioned to protect Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones at a rock concert held at the California speedway, the Angels waded into the crowd with pool cues, leaving an 18-year-old black, Meredith Hunter, dead in their wake. (The Angel who killed him was acquitted on the ground of self-defense.) It all bolstered the legend that the Angels were the toughest, meanest cyclists around...
...thriller (Tremor of Intent), the scatological novel (Enderby), the population-explosion novel (The Wanting Seed), the Third World satire (Devil of a State), the historical novel (Nothing Like the Sun), and the futuristic novel (A Clockwork Orange). Now comes MF, the biggest send-up of them all, on Claude Levi-Strauss's intellectually fashionable structural anthropology...
...Levi-Strauss's theory is that, appearances notwithstanding, the war-painted Indian and the nuclear physicist are as similar as fraternal twins: the human intellect has been operating in the same fundamental pattern since the dawn of society...
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...
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...