Interviewer: "On what occasions do you lie?" Anthony Burgess: "When I write, when I speak, when I sleep."
He was the last great modernist. Novelist, composer, librettist, essayist, semanticist, translator, critic, Anthony Burgess's versatility and erudition found expression in more than fifty books and dozens of musical compositions, from operas, choral works and song cycles to symphonies and concertos.
Here now is a kaleidoscope of a book--the culmination of twenty years of writing and research--about a man who remains best known for A Clockwork Orange, the source of Stanley Kubrick's ground breaking, mind bending and prescient film.
Tracking Burgess from Manchester to Malaya to Malta to Monte Carlo, Roger Lewis assesses Burgess's struggles and uncovers the web of truth and illusion about the writer's famous antic disposition. Burgess, the author argues, was just as much a literary confidence man and prankster as a consummate wordsmith.
Outrageously funny, honest and touching, Anthony Burgess explores the divisions that characterize its irascible subject and his darkly comic, bleakly beautiful world of fiction.
"It is a romantic idea that we should identify with the biographical subject... [Lewis] has done nothing less than shatter the mold of the genre."
Carl Rollyson had his own thoughts in the New York Sun
"Not since Lawrence Thompson on Robert Frost has there been a more serious falling out between biographer and subject. The result this time, however, is one extremely lively book, an avalanche of factual revelation, vitriolic wit, and personal disappointment that buries Burgess, and then posts a sign, Hic Jacet."
Michael Dirda, Washington Post
"One might also conclude from reading Roger Lewis' biography of Burgess, that he was less a genius than a charlatan... The result is a biography drenched in the corrosive acid of love-hate, of infatuation turned to disillusionment, which reads as a scathing attack on Burgess' work and an indictment of his life and character."
