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Bezig met laden... Little Wilson and Big God (1986)door Anthony Burgess
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 Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek.   ) kwskultety | Jul 4, 2023 |  ) dbsovereign | Jan 26, 2016 | Prior to reading this, the only other book I'd read by Anthony Burgess was "A Clockwork Orange". I was inspired to read this book, having come across a short extract, photocopied and framed on the wall of The Wheatsheaf pub in Rathbone Place, London. Anthony Burgess was once a customer and he was describing the era in the 1940s when both he and Julian Maclaren-Ross were regulars. As a great admirer of Julian Maclaren-Ross, it was a desire to read this particular section (probably only six or seven pages in total) that prompted me to read it. I should add that Burgess was gratifyingly complimentary about the work of Maclaren-Ross and brings that era beautifully to life. "Little Wilson and Big God" is only the first part of a two part biography and covers the 42 years from Burgess’s birth, in 1917, to 1959, when his time as teacher and education officer in Malaya and Brunei came to an end and he decide to devote himself to writing full time (believing he only had a year to live). Burgess was clearly very bright and something of a polymath. He taught himself languages and wrote classical music in addition to gaining scholarships and doing well at school. Despite this he was also something of a slacker as a young man, drifting through the war, and then into teaching in Malaya and Brunei. He and his wife had an open relationship from the off, and he appears to be very honest about his conduct which was frequently drunken and idiosyncratic. He has a trove of great memories. I found the whole book engrossing as he vividly recreated the Manchester of his boyhood; life in the army during the war with all its attendant pettiness and absurdities; and his various eccentricities, and onto ever more outrageous behaviour as an observant if unorthodox expat during the fag end of British colonialism. His writing style is flamboyant and sophisticated, and required a few stops to consult the dictionary, and I felt I was in the hands of a great writer at the top of his game. I eagerly anticipate the second part "You've Had Your Time". I have also bought "The Complete Enderby" too. This feels like the start of a beautiful relationship. 5/5 ( )1  nigeyb | Jan 26, 2014 | )1 libraryhermit | Mar 1, 2010 |
 Not many people know this, but on top of writing regularly for every known newspaper and magazine, Anthony Burgess writes regularly for every unknown one, too. Pick up a Hungarian quarterly or a Portuguese tabloid – and there is Burgess, discoursing on goulash or test-driving the new Fiat 500. ‘Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.’ Even today, at seventy, and still producing book after book, Burgess spends half his time writing music. He additionally claims to do all the housework. The first volume of the Burgess autobiography is only 450 pages long. Accordingly one would expect it to end when the author is about five. In fact, we follow him to the halfway mark, to early middle age, just as his writing career was getting into its gallop. Between then and now he has produced a further fifty-odd books. He was born Jack Wilson; Anthony Burgess is a nom de plume – probably one of many... Burgess may swank exasperatingly at times, but his book’s only real boast is in its subtitle, with its hi to Rousseau. Even this might be allowed as a necessary elevation in an age when the autobiography, as a form, has become little more than the pension-book of politicians and actors. Burgess has now published Little Wilson and Big God, "Being the First Part of the Autobiography" which, long as it is, takes him only to the age of forty-two in 1959 when he was told that he had an inoperable brain tumor, and a year to live. In order to provide for Lynne, he started turning out books at a prodigious rate, and now, twenty years after her death, he still, undead, goes on. Incomparable British medicine ("In point of fact, Dr. Butterfingers, that's my scalpel you're standing on") is responsible for the existence of easily the most interesting English writer of the last half century. Like Meredith, Burgess does the best things best; he also does the worst things pretty well, too... Fortunately, he has not the gift of boredom. He can make just about anything interesting except on those occasions when he seems to be writing an encoded message to N. Chomsky, in celebration not so much of linguistics as of his own glossolalia, so triumphantly realized in his screenplay for Quest for Fire. Onderdeel van de reeks(en)Bevat
These are Anthony Burgess's candid confessions: he was seduced at the age of nine by an older woman; whilst serving in Gibraltar in World War II he was thrown into jail on VE Day for calling Franco names; he once taught a group of Nazi socialites that the English equivalent of 'heil' was 'sod' and had them crying 'Sod Hitler'. Little Wilson and Big God moves from Moss Side to Malaya recalling Burgess's time as an education officer in the tropics, his tempestuous first marriage, his struggles with Catholicism and the beginning of his prolific writing life. Wise, self-deprecating and bristling with incident, this is a first-class memoir. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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