Burgess on Hemingway! The stylist and the lexicologist! The sensualist and the cynic! The adventurer and the academic! Could there be a more apt pairing in terms of literary exploration? Doubtful - and delightful. Anthony Burgess is, of course, in his own right a powerful pusher of boundaries, a lover of Joyce, of watershed origins, of deckle-edged literature - and a fine storyteller to boot. Who better to tell, dispassionately and meaningfully, the story of a writer whose literary luminance so often obliterates his humanness? This is a short book, really just a Hemingway primer - but one of the first order. It is crammed with eloquent understanding and gentle anecdote, a bedside companion for insomniacs, to propel them back to Carlos Baker (for detail) and Hotcher (for heart): and of course, most of all, back to those terrific humanistic tales that wriggle and strive for a secular code of meaning in an odd world. The book is doubly worthy: as introduction to Hem, and to Burgess. Those who are new to his acquaintanceship will relish a deep, joyful oeuvre.

Ernest Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" allows the reader to experience life on the other side of the page, so to speak, the life of the authors. Recognizing the author as a person, as having gone through the human experience, is an important aspect of the reading experience. It removes the barrier between the reader and the author thus allowing a better communication between the text and the reader. The author no longer seems distant and extraordinary, so the reader is able to absorb the book on his own terms, as one discusses life with a respected friend. Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" is particularly well-written, for Hemingway (as usual) does not talk down to the reader but rather includes the reader in his life as a matter of course. A truly remarkable bit of literature...

The book provides excellent insight into Hemingway's life without wasting a word. Every Hemingway fan should read it.

Miles Faber, Male and Female, and finally, the north american slang that is too profane to be written. These are all the incorporated subtitles of this title.
M/F is the adventure of a young man whose history bears much resemblence to that of Sophocles' King Oedipus, combined with an anciet north american fairy tale of the Algonquin Indians, though neither are necessary to know to enjoy this wonderful novel.
Mr. Burgess is at his most minimilistic and concise, stylistically, and as usual hilarious, in this at times disturbing story. As the opening few quotations suggest, this novel is about territory within human relations, as well as art, and territory that eventually leads into incest,chaos, and disorder. However, incest is not the real theme of the novel, but rather the mask for the theme of miscommunication. We follow Miles Faber from his old university(from which he is recently expelled) to New York to a small, secluded island springing from the prolific imagination of Mr. Burgess. And as he encounters one adventure after another, all of which bear some resemblence to the above mentioned literary allusions, as well as the bible, the theme of the novel is highlighted in the somewhat questionable sticky canvas' of Roshumberg, the graffity blasting a politic Norman Mailer, as well as others in the search of another prolific poet, writer, composer and artist who has yet to be discovered. What he discovers instead is the difference between youthful ambitions of chaos in art with that of the structure that all genuine art must be supported with. As Mr. Burgess has previously shown, youth is concerned with destruction (A Clockwork Orange ), whereas maturity is the offspring of order. It is a fine thing to think about bringing something new to art or life and living when one is young, but to ignore established practices without attempting to understand them is, well, youthful, and the result of inexperience or lack of imagination.
Through a maze of delightful riddles and connundrums, Miles reaches some sense of what art and life are about, coming to disregard the youthful preoccupatin with chaos and destruction. Incest eventually breeds a defective strain, as chaos in art breeds the destruction of order, the order of all that is best in mankind, love, duty, faith, shame, pity, home, hope, et cetera.

I recall reading an interview with Anthony Burgess in which he bemoaned the critical reception that "M/F" received upon its publication, and one can certainly see the point of his complaint. It is a small, highly original masterpiece that was unjustly dismissed as a frivolous exercise in intellectual faddishness. It is certainly not that; indeed, "M/F" is probably the best example of Anthony Burgess' manic, protean genius. Language, art, and myth are stirred together in a structualist stew and the resulting dish is as familiar as fish and chips and as strange as roasted Orang. This, of course, was the whole point of the structualist enterprise; to reveal the commonplace in the exotic and the exotic in the commonplace, and Burgess has great fun playing with this idea as he puts Miles Faber through his comic paces in Manhattan and Grencija (I hope I've spelt that right . . .) Don't be deceived by the book's slender size; it is a marvel of linguistic invention that repays numerous rereadings. And don't be discouraged the fact it is currently out of print; it's fairly easy to find in used book stores and it is certainly worth the effort to track down a copy. "M/F" is perhaps not of Nabokovian excellence, but it's very close. Highly recommended

I have read MF at least three times, along with most of Burgess novels. I found it very interesting, not for the plot, but for all the linguistic clues and mythological references that an attentive reader can cautch in it. We can start to play just from the title, MF, apparentely two letters of the alphabet but with a deeper meaning underneath. First of all MF are the initials of the first and last name of the main character, Miles Faber. " Miles" in Latin means "solder" and " Faber" means "artist". The term "solder" brings up the idea of distruption, death , while "artist" joints itself with something positive, with life. So in this two letters we have one the main themes of the novel, evil and good, dark and light, that dualism that is part of everyman's life. MF stays also for Male/ Female, another important theme so loved by Burgess. And I should keep on with many other clues, but I leave the readers to have fun in finding them and high recomanded the reading of others Burgess books. I think he is one of the best novelist of our century, unfortunately not always he has got the right appraisal he deserves. I also suggest the rading of the Irish writer James Joyce, Burgess "grande maestro".

Having read so much 20th. Century literature in English, I was amazed and embarrased not to have come across this important book before now. This is doubly so having read Orwell since my teenage years, yet I believe this book is far clearer in its critique of state facism than 1984. The leisurely pace and clear prose, set in the beautiful English countryside is deceptive. The story builds up to a threatening climax. It is a story of authoritarianism and love, of clear and singular vision and muddled human reality. A real must to read. Primo Levi would understood this book all too well.

Much as I hate to admit it now, I'd never heard of this book nor of Rex Warner until stumbling upon a list Anthony Burgess did for the New York Times Book Review of his Top 99 Modern Novels. The copy of the book I have just happens to include a forward by Burgess, so it seems safe to say that he did his part to maintain the reputation and readership of this fine book. And it was heartening to see that it is still in print. Heartening because this is a novel that deserves to be read and should have made many more "Best of" lists.

One strange deficiency in the literature of the 20th Century is the relative paucity of novels about fascism, its attractions and its awful consequences for those who believed. Sure, there are plenty of books about the Holocaust, but almost all are written from the victims' perspective. But while we have a rich literature depicting the mindset of Communists (Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, etc.), there aren't many similar books describing how someone, a young idealist perhaps, might have been drawn to fascism, even Nazism, but then been disillusioned, or even eaten by the revolution they helped to foment.

In at least this regard, Rex Warner's Aerodrome may well be the best novel ever written about fascism. The book is a pretty simple allegory--which though the critics I was able to find say was influenced mainly by Kafka, seemed to me to owe much more to Orwell's Coming Up for Air. The narrator, Roy, has grown up in The Village, a bucolic country town with more than its share of drunkenness, adultery, and incest. Bordering on the Village is the Aerodrome, clean, orderly, modern, technological, it represents everything that the Village is not.

Amidst a burgeoning mystery over who his real parents are, Roy joins the Air Force, drawn by its orderliness, attempting to please his girlfriend, and deeply impressed by the rigid but charismatic Air Vice-Marshal. The Vice-Marshal is determined to expand the Aerodrome and bring the Village under his control, remaking it in the same sterile image as the Aerodrome.

Roy meanwhile comes to realize that for all the disorder and human frailty on display in his home town, it is at least alive with possibilities :

I began to see that this life, in spite of its drunkenness and its inefficiency, was wider and deeper than the activity in which we were constricted by the iron compulsion of the Air Vice-Marshal's ambition. It was a life whose very vagueness concealed a wealth of opportunity, whose uncertainty called for adventure, whose aspects were innumerable and varied as the changes of light and colour throughout the year. It was a life whose unwieldiness was the consequence of its immensity. No skill could precisely calculate the effects of any action, and all action was dangerous.

There, in a nutshell, is the human dilemma : on the one hand we long for a world that would be safe and predictable and would yield to calculation, but, on the other, such calculations are beyond our meager mortal powers, so that whenever folks seek to impose order, they succeed merely in eliminating freedom and stifling progress. The appeal of fascism--or communism, or Nazism, or all the other -isms--is precisely that it holds out the promise of having finally invented the human calculus which will provide security, without any of the nasty side effects. That this appeal has always proven false does not seem to dampen the human need for, nor the responsiveness to, such promises.

Perhaps the best aspect of this novel is its timelessness. Though it is clearly a comment upon the 1930s and 40s, the Village, with its verdant fields, its convoluted genealogies, its interfamilial murders, and lurking just across the way the orderly utopia of the Aerodrome, suggests Man after the Fall as much as it does Britain just before WWII. The themes that Warner is dealing with are eternal. That he manages to present them in such a natural and readable way makes the book one that everyone should read.

GRADE : A+

It's rare that I encounter a book in English that I need to read with a dictionary handy. Anthony Burgess' autobiography is the first book which has forced this in quite a while. The life itself was rather fascinating, covering primarily that portion of Burgess' life before he became a writer. This is the point in a writer's life which is interesting. After they settle into the task of actually writing, their lives tend to become dull as dirt.

Anthony Burgess, the great linguistic writer of the 20th century, has succeeded in publishing something quite out of the ordinary-- he has written an autobiography actually worth reading. With most autobiographies, the authors tend to center on themselves, writing with the condescending bathos that only exists when one is talking of oneself. Burgess, on the other, hand, establishes his literary hubris early on, yet it never becomes condescending nor immitigably self-centered. He writes as one who realises both his genius as well as his shortcomings. The former he shows in his erodite vocabulary, his obscure puns, and his awe-inspiring knowledge of etymology; the latter is shown in his failure in school, his impersonal and inadequate personality, his extreme shortcomings as a husband, and his extessentialist-like apathy regarding death.

What ultimately sets him apart from other autobiographers, as mentioned earlier, is that he seems to center on others moreso than himself; in "Little Wilson and Big God, the tumultuous 20th century is viewed through a myriad of reference frames, all of which are given equal importance (even those, strangely enough, that would be seen to disagree with his opines).

Being a Burgess novel, one can expect to see highly established vocabulary; he frequently makes references to and puns in foreign languages, from Anglo-Saxon to ancient Gaelic. In one case, he tells of translating popular song into Latin. However, as opposed to his Clockwork Orange, he does not speak in some imagined colloquial dialect, and his excellent points are therefore not lost to the audience.

If someone is looking for an autobiography that can actually offer insight into the mind of a genius, look no further than this gem of a work.

How can I describe "Byrne," a book by Burgess / (Anthony)? Putative novel, his last (O sorrow!). / 'S about one Michael Byrne, a "defective lecherous / Dreamer," all in ottava rima, (borrowed / From Ariosto), but which, to be sure, here is / Livelier and more fun than a carload / Of television sitcoms, no matter they / Be on Sunday, Wednesday or Saturday. / More Rabelaisian and Rabelais, / Out-Byrons Byron's endless long "Don Juan," / Satire, outrageous rhymes, in many ways / Better than Happy Hour,a ten-cent brew one / Downs; a treat for e'en those who're too laz- / Y or wary of poetic doin'. / Relax, sit back, you've got a lot to learn / From this wild poetic novel 'titled "Byrne." / "Why choose this agony of versifying / Instead of tapping journalistic prose?" / Burgess asks, but we know he's simply trying / To have some fun, which, as everybody knows, / 'S not easy in this oft PC-ifying / World where everything--and nothing--goes. / Burgess shows that poetry can be fun, / Hilariously accessible to everyone. / Well p'rhaps not everyone. Halfway through he / Briefly changes to a different scheme, / A loftier prosody, more chewy, / Used by dreary Spenser in "Fairie Queene" / (Which we all suffered through in academe). / Meanwhile Tim and Tom appear, reprehend / Vanished pater, etcetera. I deem / "Byrne" versifying fun, it recommend. / It's one of those, you hate to see it end. ---James Hursey

I was lucky enough to stumble upon this book in a used book store during a class field trip. Familiar or not with Anthony Burgess, this book follows in the string of greatness. The three individual stories complement each other in many interesting ways, with a biography, a musical, and life in the future. The development of the book is absolutely amazing.

Enderby is a minor poet, with a safe, comfortable existence. He is forced by a chain of circumstance to engage the 60's world of women's magazines, pop stars, and monster movies, along the way losing and recovering his poetic muse. This (or these; ENDERBY was originally published as two novels) book was written while Burgess was under a sentence of death from his doctor, in an attempt to create an estate to leave his wife. Nevertheless, the book is both funny and wise. Along with the comedy, Burgess has interesting things to say about art and the artist. He also has fun, especially with word-play. This is the only book I know in which the word 'onions' appears four times in a row in a perfectly correct English.

What could be better than Burgess on literally everything? Pun most definitely intended! Almost 200 selected essays on the famous and the arcane, Burgess opines on books sent for his review by The Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, and the Observer between 1978 and 1985, and, to the reader's delight, he invariably relates tales about the writers themselves, taking aim at sacred cows, shattering myths and pulverizing clay idols but not without deifying the immortal and creating legends along the way. Delving into dictionaries, linguistic tomes, music compendiums, biographies, Oxford Books of you name of it, scholastic works, popular novels, acclaimed works, collections, anthologies - he profiles it all with huge chunks of personal glimpses into his own life and times. He chronicles works by and about Joyce, Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, Dickens, Orwell, Waugh, Wells, Stendahl, Austin, Boswell, Fielding, Fiedler, Plath, Lawrence, Golding, Goldman, Conrad, Capote, de Beauvoir, Greene, Greer, O'Hara, Richardson, Janeway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Friedan, "the great Virginia herself," Stein, Wagner, Beethoven, Weill, Sullivan, Elgar - getting too specialized for you? Try "Garping", on John Irving, "Dorogoi Bunny, Dear Volodya..." on the Nabokov-Wilson Letters, "Anal Magic" on Mailer, "The Magus of Mallorca" on Graves, "Thurbing" on Thurber, "Hem Not Writing Good" on Hemingway, "Celtic Sacrifice" on Wilde. Large doses of his wry, dry, erudite, phenomenal self on fiction, prose, poetry, language, religion, art, fashion, film, food, politics, travel, theater, astrology - reviews of books on vices and dirty jokes even! There is a wealth of references throughout to other writings, critiques, essays, events and locations. For light fare on weighty subjects, try "Grunts from a Sexist Pig" wherein he was sent a pink marzipan pig, the dubious reward for being voted (along with Mailer, Fiedler, Lowell, Malamud and Beckett) a Sexist Pig of the Year, a result of his feud with Virago Press over their choice of name: "Now all my dictionaries tell me that a virago is a noisy, violent, ill-tempered woman, a scold or a shrew. There is, true, an archaic meaning which makes a virago a kind of amazon... .But the etymology insists on a derivation from Latin...and no amount of semantic twisting can force the word into a meaning which denotes intrinsic female virtues... . I think it was a silly piece of naming, and it damages what is a brave and valuable venture." Or my personal favorite, "Telejesus (or Mediachrist)", the story of how he came to write the screenplay for "Man of Nazareth.": "The ball was slammed into my court, and there was a long silence while I got down to work. This meant loading my typewriter and the New Testament into my motor caravan and setting off for the Alps. ...Wherever I went with my caravan, typewriter and Greek Testament, I was hounded by the religious experts of Radiotelevisione Italiana...with requests, orders, ultimata. They pursued me from Rome to Ansedonia to Siena to Bracciano to Rome, telling me what to write. "Write it yourselves, for Christ's sake,' I said reverently. 'No, no, you're the writer. Now write this.' One remarkable suggestion was that Jesus, in formulating the Lord's Prayer, should stumble over the word padre, stuttering papa papa in involuntary homage to His Holiness. I pointed out that in English this would have been fafa fafa, which is a homage to nobody. Theological advisers were ten a penny,...I said I would trade them all for an adviser in carpentry." Open this book to any page, you will never fail to be entertained, enlightened, uplifted. Keep it by your bedside, in your bookbag, briefcase or backpack, take it to work and take it on holiday, but don't let it out of your sight! Unbelievably, this book is out of print! Too, too many of Burgess' books are out of print. How could the publishing world let this happen? Search the shelves, exhaust the Net, move mountains, whatever you have to do, but get yourself a copy of this treasure - it is not to be missed! The only thing that could surpass Homage to Qwert Yuiop (have you figured it out yet?) would be a companion volume spanning 1986 to 1993. What, one wonders, was left out of this edition? What is still out there unpublished?

OK, so I basically stole the title for this review from Dylan Thomas (another author to read!). At any rate, it seems this oversized book is out of print, although Amazon.com will try to find it for you. If they can't...

122 pages of fascinating photos, drawings, manuscript revisions, and quotes by Joyce; statues, drawings, photos, and even stamps of Joyce! The prints are excellent, and help you feel like you know the man (and family) just a little bit better. Originally published at $39.95 (a price for Joyce fans only, I think), its new low cost makes it an excellent purchase for all interested in literature and/or photography. I haven't seen the $72 "Images of Joyce," (sold at Amazon) but this well-designed book, showing Joyce at various ages and locations, is well worth looking for.

This is a great book both as a simple cookbook (best oxtail soup recipe I've found) and just for fun. It takes the dishes mentioned in ULYSSES and gives recipes as well as putting them in the context of the book. Most of the recipes are period; no microwaves here. But I'm no great cook, and I've found that I can do just fine with most of the recipes, though many are too time-consuming for everyday use. But for special occasions, the recipes are wonderful to actually use and the rest of the time the book provides a historical reference and insight into Joyce's masterpiece.