Reviewing the reviews of Anthony Burgess
For those
whose idea of sheer bliss is reading literary reviews in their favourite
newspaper on a rainy Sunday afternoon, (maybe followed by an invigorating nap
curled up on the sofa), this book helps you to conjure exactly that pleasant
feeling again and again.
The Ink
trade is a collection of sixty excellent literary reviews published between
1961 and 1993 in numerous journals and papers. Reviews of those very novels
that excited us in the last decades of the previous millennia and on top of that
written by Anthony Burgess, pen-man “par excellence”, a peer reviewer so to
say, for he was both writer and a prolific reviewer at the same time. His
reviews are understandably different than those by academics like Davenport,
Kenner or Kermode.
Burgess is
the man who is famous for his “..clockwork Orange", infamous for the
opening line in his "Earthly Powers” and enormous for his entertaining
biographical dyptique "Little Wilson ..." and "You’ve had your
time". He is a brillant writer, clever, witty and with a sharpened quill.
I've always
had a special affection for Burgess. With his “Here Comes Everybody” and his
"shorter and edited Finnagans Wake”, it was he who “explained” Joyce and
Eliot to me, at a young age where neither my secondary school teachers nor my
reading experience could have helped me.
Reading
reviews of books already read, reminds us of the joy we experienced when
reading them for the first time, when we were 30 or so years younger. But it is
titillating to compare our own weak riminiscences with Burgess take on the same
book. He discusses Burroughs’ Naked Lunch for instance, Desolation Angels by
Kerouac, Lowry’s Volcano, Nabokov’s nymphe, Hemingway’s cojones and Eco’s rose.
There is also ( Noblesse oblige ) a lot on Eliot’s Waste land and Joyce’s
Dublinaria.
In some
cases Burgess reminds us of books we might have passed by, forgotten or totally
misssed. In my case Evelyn Waugh for instance, whose titles I hurriedly jotted
down, a bit ashamed I must confess.
The format
of the review makes this collection an easy reading, freeing time for the
thinking and the enjoying. For enjoying is what it is all about. Burgess
famously was a brillant word craftsman. Working like a goldsmith he embelishes
his text with exquisite handpicked words, looping filigreed sentences and shiny
marvels of expressions.
Some people
take antidepressants to chase anxiety away. I read a Burgess review and have
sweet dreams.
