You've Had Your Time
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- $169.00
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- $169.00
Publisher Description
After returning from a trip to Brunei, Anthony Burgess, initially believing he has only a year to live, begins to write - novels, film scripts, television series, articles. It is the life of a man desperate to earn a living through the written word. He finds at first that writing brings little success, and later that success, and the obligations it brings, interfere with his writing - especially of fiction. There were vast Hollywood projects destined never to be made, novels the critics snarled at, journalism that scandalised the morally scrupulous.
There is the éclat of A Clockwork Orange (and the consequent calls for Burgess to comment on violent atrocities), the huge success - after a long barren period - of Earthly Powers. There is a terrifying first marriage, his description of which is both painful and funny. His second marriage - and the discovery that he has a four-year-old son - changes his life dramatically, and he and Liana escape to the Mediterranean, for an increasingly European life. With this marriage comes the triumphant rebirth of sex, creative energy and travel - to America, to Australia and all over Europe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Burgess returned home to England from Malaya in 1959 to a medical diagnosis that he had less than a year to live. He turned himself into a ``busy hack'' to earn royalties for his wife Lynne, whose suicide attempt and subsequent death from alcoholic cirrhosis left him with deep-seated guilt. His hectic writing life, ``an agony mitigated by drink,'' was uplifted in 1968 when he married his Italian mistress Liana Macellari, who had borne him a son five years earlier. With disarming candor and coruscating wit, the prolific novelist-critic discusses his distaste for the Beatles and the swinging '60s, the writing and filming of A Clockwork Orange , his peripatetic existence from Singapore to Manhattan, the ordeal of teaching and a roller-coaster career that often left him ``too much in the paws of producers and directors.'' While it lacks the soul-searching urgency of his first autobiographical installment Little Wilson and Big God , this self-portrait is nevertheless a joy to read.
