the Ink Trade by Anthony Burgess

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.

Anthony Burgess : "You've had your time"

Signed first edition/ first print of "You've had your time"

Anthony Burgess : Earthly Powers

Lincoln Seligman : Cardinals ( Acrylic - 2005 )

It was Anthony Burgess’s misfortune to be shortlisted at the same time as William Golding for the Booker Prize 1980. The jury preferred “Rites of Passage” over “Earthly Powers” but the final decision was a close one. Maybe it was Burgess’s refusal to attend the ceremony if the organization would not confirm his victory in advance, which tilted the balance in Golding’s favor. But even if the judges would have indulged in the writer’s prank, practically it would not have been possible, for Golding’s name fell only thirty minutes before the ceremony… So the story goes.

Still, for Burgess, the Booker would have been just one more confirmation of his immense talent. And his book Earthly Powers, still ranks today on most “best of” - lists, “best 25” – lists or any other literary canon. A few weeks ago, I picked up an old unread copy, lost somewhere between my TBR stacks. The glue which held the pages together had deteriorated and each page came lose as I was reading it, each page of it, all 678 pages.

The story, which Burgess kick-starts with the now famous “outrageously provocative” first sentence is a fictional biography of an acclaimed British writer, named Kenneth Toomey, who looks back with the unreliable memory of his eighty-one years, at the twentieth century in which he has played his small part but of which he has certainly witnessed more than many others.

Intrigued by this fictional biography, I have also read his two part “true biography”: ”Little Wilson and Big God” and “You’ve had your time”.

The overlapping of the “true” and the fictional is interesting on its own account.

99 Novels

Anthony Burgess's book Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 — A Personal Choice covers a 44-year span between 1939 and 1983. Burgess was a prolific reader, in his early career reviewing more than 350 novels in just over two years for the Yorkshire Post. In the course of his career he wrote over thirty novels.


The list represents his personal choices