Anthony Burgess (Hardcover)

The Real Life of Anthony Burgess by Andrew Biswell 4.8 out of 5 stars (10)  £6.99

› Explore similar items

Review
'A great genius may appear in almost any disguise; even in the disguise of a successful novelist'. Chesterton

Anthony Burgess, born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in 1917, grew up in Manchester to become the writer of more than 60 books. A driven man, obsessed with language, he produced at least two books a year at the height of his career, including novels and important critical works on James Joyce and D H Lawrence. Roger Lewis, whose earlier studies include Peter Sellers, has taken 20 years to produce a vast biography of Anthony Burgess, a man of many talents, who although best known as the author of A Clockwork Orange was also a composer, translator, academic and teacher during his long career. Despite his success, Burgess was haunted by the deaths of his mother and sister when he was less than two years old. This tragedy shaped his personality, of which 'anger and gloom were at the core', and followed him through his novels, two marriages and illness until his death from lung cancer in 1993. Ill-tempered and outspoken, he felt 'uneasy about being understood' and would bear long grudges against his critics. Roger Lewis expertly examines each chapter in Burgess's life in meticulous detail and juxtaposes his life story with Burgess's memoirs and analysis of his novels, concentrating on the parallel themes of love, sex, marriage, death and violence that ran between his writing and his life to give us an all-encompassing study of a troubled and colourful man. Lewis devotes too much space to his own experiences and complicated attitude to his subject, with immense digressions that sometimes stifle the man at the heart of the book and may prove unappealing to those not already familiar with Burgess. In spite of this, fans of Anthony Burgess and indeed Roger Lewis should not be disappointed with this meaty study of a literary heavyweight. (Kirkus UK)

Loquacious portraitist Lewis (The Real Life of Laurence Olivier, 1997, etc.) leaves no stone unturned in his obsessive and hardly sympathetic life of the tortured author of A Clockwork Orange. Born in 1917 to a working-class Catholic family in northeast Manchester, John Wilson (his name until his first novel, Time for a Tiger, was published in 1956) lost his sister and mother early to the flu epidemic and grew into an unfeeling, massively egotistical bookworm. His early years as an English teacher married to an unstoppable Welsh dipsomaniac ended with his transformation into Anthony Burgess, pompous polymath of mock scholarship. His thousand-word-a-day writing quota ensued from the famously inaccurate 1959 diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor; he churned out four novels during the one year he thought he had left and was preoccupied thereafter with afflictions of the body. Later remarried to an Italian countess, Burgess composed more than 30 titles before his death in 1993, ranging from early "jungle novels" about his travels and on to potboilers and copious literary criticism (Joyce, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, and Shakespeare), as well as Broadway adaptations, screenplays (Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth), and translations. His lurid study of mechanized violence didn't take off until Stanley Kubrick's chilling film version in 1971, and Lewis makes some mischievous revelations about A Clockwork Orange: Burgess lifted the idea from a French translation he had done years before, and the novel supposedly encrypts covert operations the author was allegedly engaged in with Her Majesty's Secret Service. Aiming to situate Burgess in the grand scheme of English-language literary history, Lewis does so magisterially, especially in the chatty, page-long footnotes comparing him to heavyweight contemporaries Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, and Iris Murdoch, among others. Lewis can forgive his subject for preposterous subterfuges, but can't rid himself of "discomfiture" over Burgess's extreme writerly froideur. Trenchant and dogged, expunging the biographer of a 20-year anxiety of influence. (Kirkus Reviews)

Express, 30 November 2002
Lewis is an intellectual showman, a connoisseur of the arcane, a collector of titillating trivia.

See all Product Description

10 Reviews 5 star:  (1) 4 star:  (2) 3 star:  (3) 2 star:  (1) 1 star:  (3)           Average Customer Review 2.7 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   11 of 11 people found the following review helpful: 1.0 out of 5 stars 'When a biographer hates his subject can he be trusted?'', 25 Oct 2003 By  Peter Leonard (Liskeard, Cornwall United Kingdom) - See all my reviews John Wilson, aka Anthony Burgess, died in November 1993 the author of 32 novels, various televison/film scripts, translations from various languages of plays, opera libretti, etc, a composer in his own right, a televison personality, teacher, member of the royal society of literature, etc etc. Here we have a biography that has taken, or so it's claimed, twenty years to write. And yet it makes no use of the major sources? Often quotes coversations from the past - from memory? - without sourcing the information. It is obviously a resentful book, but worse is basically flawed, especially with regard to the facts of Burgess / Wilson's life. Further it ends in 1968? Thus twenty-five years of very (most?)productive life is ignored - who knows why? - and that part of Burgess' life that it does cover, consist of a number of wild and unsubstantiated assertions - which factually are wrong, and in some instances border on total absurdity. Burgess doesn't deserve such shallow treatment. He was a great writer, a modern, who eperimented with form and style, and who enlarged the possibilites of the English novel for his contempories and those who follow after him. A great disapointment as a true depiction of Burgess, but a good example of biography as fiction - very unconvincing fiction, to be sure. We must all await a rational, well researched and calm biography of someone who was after all said and done a remarkable personality. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   7 of 7 people found the following review helpful: 1.0 out of 5 stars Onanistic rubbish, 3 April 2006 By  A. J. Cowburn "aj_cowburn" (m-m-m-manchester) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    This review is from: Anthony Burgess (Paperback) I think this autobiography finds itself wrongly labelled as biography. If you want to know what Roger Lewis (who? Exactly!) thinks about Stephen Fry's portrayal of Oscar Wilde and how Roger Lewis (who? Exactly!) enjoyed many fine dinners in the company of Richard Ellman, then this is just the book for you. Its endless self-referential footnotes sketch a portrait, overburdened with detail of the life and opinions of Roger Lewis (who? Exactly!). All this would be irritating and disappointing by itself but when Roger Lewis (who? Exactly!) goes on to call Anthony Burgess "egotistical" it is too much. I suppose scholarly and objective biography died with Richard Ellman. This piece of trash doesn't deserve the name. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   4 of 4 people found the following review helpful: 2.0 out of 5 stars Stars and Daggers, 24 Jun 2005 By  M. J. Saxton (Dewsbury, West Yorkshire United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    It is difficult to be enthusiastic about a book full of so much negativity, and footnotes. Not only are we given relentless detail about what a dreadful man Burgess was, his manifold hang-ups, and personal obnoxiousness, but this biography's author also seems determined to vent his spleen in the reader's general direction. In what is pretty dense prose in places, the colossal amount of footnotes does nothing to help the reader make sense of the chronology of Burgess' life. What does emerge is the portrait of a complex human being, which is tantalisingly interesting, but with such sniping from the author at his subject, instead of insight, it seems hardly worth the bother of getting to the end. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this) Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review › See all 10 customer reviews...		Ad feedback   Most Recent Customer Reviews 4.0 out of 5 stars I Can See Why this Book is Contentious, but Wonderful I loved this book, but I can see in it what those reviewers who reviewed negatively can see. Burgess is a cult author - try finding anything of his (apart from A Clockwork... Read more Published on 9 Jul 2007 by Clifford 3.0 out of 5 stars Why one literary critic shouldn't write a biography of another? You may find this book very disturbing. Not because of its subject matter, although few would dispute the claim that Burgess himself tried to be disturbing as often... Read more Published on 25 Jun 2007 by ericross 1.0 out of 5 stars an egotistical travesty Roger Lewis's mean-spirited and astonishingly egotistical biography is a travesty. It largely refuses to acknowledge Anthony Burgess's protean talent and wide-ranging artistic... Read more Published on 23 Feb 2007 by pburgess 5.0 out of 5 stars A Direct Hit It took me several readings, from start to finish, of Roger Lewis' jaundiced biography in order to reach a conclusion about its merit. Read more Published on 17 Sep 2005 by D. White 4.0 out of 5 stars Hero no longer I can't decide whether I'm happy to have read this biography. I used to admire Burgess and his work, and in the first one hundred pages I was rather indignant at the merciless... Read more Published on 3 Sep 2003 by C.M.Struik 3.0 out of 5 stars A parody of a biography, rather than a biography Not quite a biography, not a lit crit study either, this extensive demolition job is designed to show that Burgess was "a parody of a great writer, rather than a great writer"... Read more Published on 7 April 2003 by widsithww 3.0 out of 5 stars pointless, but good fun The blurb says this is a ‘delirious kaleidoscope’ of a book, meaning it isn’t really a biography or a critical study. Read more Published on 3 Nov 2002 Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews › See all 10 customer reviews...

• Books > Biography > Novelists, Poets & Playwrights > Novelists
• Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > History & Criticism > Literary Studies > 20th Century
• Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > History & Criticism > Novels & Novelists > 20th Century

• Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
• I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
• I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.