You've Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess - Hardcover

Burgess, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0434098213 ISBN 13: 9780434098217

Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd, 1990

Synopsis

This is the second part of Anthony Burgess's confessions, the first volume of which was entitled "Little Wilson and Big God". The narratvie begins in 1959, with the author's return to England from Brunei and, after the explosion of a prognosis which gave him a year to live, the start of a professional writing career which is still in gaudy flower. It ends, somewhat arbitrarily, in 1983 with the centenary celebrations of James Joyce's birth, which prompt certain conclusions about the relationship between literature and life. The life depicted here is that of a man desperate to earn a living through writing. The writing comprises all the media, including film, and the reader will learn about cinematic enterprises that succeeded and failed, novels the critics snarled at, journalism that scandalised the morally scrupulous. A strange marriage ends with the cirrhosis of the wife, a second marriage brings a triumphant rebirth of sex, creative energy and foreign travel, as well as an illegitimate fatherhood made legitimate.

About this title

Review

"Extraordinarily lively, amazingly zestful, gutsy, bawdy fun" (Sunday Express)

"This autobiography, packed with extraordinary moments... provides a unique picture of today's literary world. It also has the effect of pinning Burgess down, making him, improbable as he is, real and believable. We will, I think read him better for this, and appreciate him more" (Observer)

"What Burgess ''shows off'' in these pages is the vivid interest that a writer's life can hold when it is lived by a writer with a robust temperament, a showman's appetite for vulgarity and the kind of gargantuan, omnivorous learning that helps give polymathy a good name... You've Had Your Time is an exhilarating book which, like the best of Burgess's novels, fulfills the ancient obligations of delighting, instructing and moving with incomparable panache" (Independent)

"In two huge volumes of "confessions" Burgess wove a vast tapestry of his life. William Boyd, an admirer, said they were among the best novels that Burgess ever wrote" (Guardian)

Book Description

Following Little Wilson and Big God, this is the second volume of Anthony Burgess's autobiography, spanning the years from 1959 - 1982, from the start of his professional writing career to the centenary of James Joyce's birth and its effect on Burgess.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0434098213
• ISBN 13: 9780434098217
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 403