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Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Essays
This collection of nonfiction pieces includes irreverent views on such diverse topics as travel, people, food, film, music, literature, and language
589 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 1986
3 people are currently reading
186 people want to read
About the author
Anthony Burgess
326 books4,193 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .
Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 15, 2008
sometimes all the cleverness of Burgess becomes wearying over the course of a long novel, I think. Some of his plots are just too cute for me, no matter what rewards he hangs on them.
But this collection of book reviews by Burgess makes great bedtime reading. Short pieces, where the Burgess wit and play shine. If you like to read Burgess just for fun too, then read these book reviews, not just his novels.
But this collection of book reviews by Burgess makes great bedtime reading. Short pieces, where the Burgess wit and play shine. If you like to read Burgess just for fun too, then read these book reviews, not just his novels.
March 18, 2016
I enjoyed this collection so much I made an index for it:
https://jamesnaudi.wordpress.com/2016...
https://jamesnaudi.wordpress.com/2016...
September 21, 2017
Anthony Burgess stunned the world with his ultra-violent novel A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, a sensational tale of youth violence that mocked the emerging teen culture of the Sixties even as influential rock heroes (like Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones) were skilfully incorporating the sexual menace and disturbing androgyny of ultra-violent Alex into their own dazzling onstage theatrics.
With all this as background, it's very disappointing to read this patchwork collection of book and music reviews and discover what a stodgy old fuddy-duddy Anthony Burgess really was. He's oblivious to the irony of his own position, too. He ridicules hippy college students savagely for not "digging" Jane Austen because there's no sex in her books and because Jane (presumably) never had sex in real life. But there's plenty of crude violence and sex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Why be angry at other people's coarseness and not your own? Why does Burgess offer up such exaggerated praise of Jane's modesty and good taste when his own books are so vulgar and obscene? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. On the other hand, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
This same problem comes up when Burgess reviews modern authors. I'm no fan of John Irving's, but it's very jarring to hear Burgess dismiss his work as being full of pointless violence and sentimentality. Burgess is right, of course. But who wrote the book on violence, anyway? And as for sentimentality, Burgess himself has plenty. Just check out his fawning tribute to Princess Grace of Monaco. (Evidently even living in Monaco Burgess never heard any of the gossip about poor Grace's alcoholism, or her massive failures as a parent.)
The low point of the book was probably Burgess' glowing review of William Styron's SOPHIE'S CHOICE. There's a truly bizarre contradiction here. Burgess, for all his failings, was a staggeringly original literary talent who really thought outside the box. Nobody had ever dared imagine a hero like Alex before A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and nobody ever will again. Styron, on the other hand, was a very conventional southern novelist. His sentimentality about the slave-owning south, and his discomfort with blacks and Jews, led him to write slavery novels where blacks are less important than whites, and a Holocaust novel where the only victim who matters is a beautiful blonde of Polish Catholic descent. Real Holocaust survivors, (such as the late Elie Wiesel) were furious about this at the time. Anthony Burgess loves it. And do you know why? Because his only real loyalty is to the Catholic church. And it's very gratifying to him to see the real, actual Jewish victims of the Holocaust erased by Catholic victims. Because that absolves the Church of blame, and allows stodgy, closet anti-Semites like Burgess to go right on ignoring the Church's real crimes against the Jews. It all makes sense, if you understand how much Burgess hates Jews. And freedom. And feminism. And humanity in general.
Still, it's very disappointing to see the creator of Alex go down on the creator of Sophie.
With all this as background, it's very disappointing to read this patchwork collection of book and music reviews and discover what a stodgy old fuddy-duddy Anthony Burgess really was. He's oblivious to the irony of his own position, too. He ridicules hippy college students savagely for not "digging" Jane Austen because there's no sex in her books and because Jane (presumably) never had sex in real life. But there's plenty of crude violence and sex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Why be angry at other people's coarseness and not your own? Why does Burgess offer up such exaggerated praise of Jane's modesty and good taste when his own books are so vulgar and obscene? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. On the other hand, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
This same problem comes up when Burgess reviews modern authors. I'm no fan of John Irving's, but it's very jarring to hear Burgess dismiss his work as being full of pointless violence and sentimentality. Burgess is right, of course. But who wrote the book on violence, anyway? And as for sentimentality, Burgess himself has plenty. Just check out his fawning tribute to Princess Grace of Monaco. (Evidently even living in Monaco Burgess never heard any of the gossip about poor Grace's alcoholism, or her massive failures as a parent.)
The low point of the book was probably Burgess' glowing review of William Styron's SOPHIE'S CHOICE. There's a truly bizarre contradiction here. Burgess, for all his failings, was a staggeringly original literary talent who really thought outside the box. Nobody had ever dared imagine a hero like Alex before A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and nobody ever will again. Styron, on the other hand, was a very conventional southern novelist. His sentimentality about the slave-owning south, and his discomfort with blacks and Jews, led him to write slavery novels where blacks are less important than whites, and a Holocaust novel where the only victim who matters is a beautiful blonde of Polish Catholic descent. Real Holocaust survivors, (such as the late Elie Wiesel) were furious about this at the time. Anthony Burgess loves it. And do you know why? Because his only real loyalty is to the Catholic church. And it's very gratifying to him to see the real, actual Jewish victims of the Holocaust erased by Catholic victims. Because that absolves the Church of blame, and allows stodgy, closet anti-Semites like Burgess to go right on ignoring the Church's real crimes against the Jews. It all makes sense, if you understand how much Burgess hates Jews. And freedom. And feminism. And humanity in general.
Still, it's very disappointing to see the creator of Alex go down on the creator of Sophie.
June 28, 2016
When he died Burgess left behind three printed collections of journalism. And they all impress.
This strikes me as the best of the three collections, not because of its sheer size but for the breadth and depth of the terrain it traverses: screeds against radical feminists, articles on Scott Fitzgerald's stories, Hemingway's letters, the English language, Papal visits, Alasdair Gray, John Kennedy Toole, John Steinbeck, John Irving, James Joyce, Christianity - and those are just the ones off the top of my head.
Burgess knocks off a 2,000 word article as easily as snoring. He sees no point in reviewing what he knows he's unlikely to appreciate, so most of his reviewing is positive. A rare and hilarious exception is his review of Norman Mailer's outsized Egyptian novel Ancient Evenings. The title is 'Anal Magic.' Since you can buy this collection for less than £3 on the Internet, there really is no excuse for not doing so.
This strikes me as the best of the three collections, not because of its sheer size but for the breadth and depth of the terrain it traverses: screeds against radical feminists, articles on Scott Fitzgerald's stories, Hemingway's letters, the English language, Papal visits, Alasdair Gray, John Kennedy Toole, John Steinbeck, John Irving, James Joyce, Christianity - and those are just the ones off the top of my head.
Burgess knocks off a 2,000 word article as easily as snoring. He sees no point in reviewing what he knows he's unlikely to appreciate, so most of his reviewing is positive. A rare and hilarious exception is his review of Norman Mailer's outsized Egyptian novel Ancient Evenings. The title is 'Anal Magic.' Since you can buy this collection for less than £3 on the Internet, there really is no excuse for not doing so.
September 26, 2011
"But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen" is a collection of essays that remains useful after several reads. I've added numerous titles to my library based on the articles and recommendations in this volume.
January 4, 2016
Burgess seems to me, a non-Englishman, a paragon of a certain sort of Englishmen. Educated, clever, curmudgeonly, bigoted, assured of his own rightness' alternately delightful and annoying. This book of short pieces seems to me to express his qualities best.
May 9, 2023
Brilliant but too much for a straight read.
Much as I love the man and his voice, his flashes or erudition and his wry humor, this does get to be too much if read in one stretch. Better take it a few reviews at a time.
And boy how he loved to irk feminists. He would probably be cancelled these days.
Much as I love the man and his voice, his flashes or erudition and his wry humor, this does get to be too much if read in one stretch. Better take it a few reviews at a time.
And boy how he loved to irk feminists. He would probably be cancelled these days.
April 27, 2022
Inconceivably bad title aside, this is a breathtaking collection. Breathtaking not because of its beauty etc., but because of how good Burgess is at book reviewing. This is *the* Goodreads book. It's a pity Goodreads doesn't care.
May 25, 2012
A good bathroom book. Quick, easy essays. Interesting reviews of books I've never heard of.
Read
June 7, 2015Great collection of essays. I just love his prose, his style.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews