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Chargement... The Ink Trade: Selected Journalism 1961-1993 (2018)par Anthony Burgess
Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. 11   Macumbeira | Oct 22, 2018 | 
 Most of his preoccupations manifest here will come as no surprise to his devotees: Joyce, the perpetual futility of using high literature as the basis of films and the coarse chimera of synergy, slang and its lexicographers, the crassness of TV in 1993 (when, by today’s standards, it was at least watchable), the disgusting paltriness of censors, the brilliance of V. S. Naipaul and William Burroughs, the usefulness of pornography, the joy of blasphemy and the inadequacy of prose (and poetry) in comparison to music, where several lines can be played simultaneously. Many of the pieces suggest that Burgess adhered to Wilde’s paradox in The Picture of Dorian Gray, that criticism is a form of autobiography, an ever-accreting bildungsroman marked not by events, but by thoughts, spiritual moods and imaginative passions. Criticism is, in Burgess’s case, an autobiography of multiple contradictions. In spite of a disturbing number of typos there is much to relish among these 60 pieces, several of which are previously unpublished. Burgess on slang is captivating, as you’d expect from a linguist who in-vented Nadsat for his Clockwork Orange droogs. He was also an indefatigable collector and disseminator of odd words – gulosity, borborygmous, callipygous, ambages – and why say pun when you can say “paranomasia”? In “Here Parla Man Marcommunish” (1966), the polyglot conceives another continental dialect in the hope that joining “the common market will give us an opportunity to start a new wave of Europeanising English’’.
"The title of journalist is probably very noble, but I lay no real claim to it. I am, I think, a novelist and a musical composer manqué: I make no other pretensions ..." (Anthony Burgess) Despite his modest claims, Anthony Burgess was an enormously prolific journalist. During his life he published two substantial collections of journalism, Urgent Copy (1968) and Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986); a posthumous collection of occasional essays, One Man's Chorus, was published in 1998. These collections are now out of print, and Burgess's journalism, a key part of his prodigious output, has fallen into neglect. The Ink Trade is a brilliant new selection of his reviews and articles, some savage, some crucial in establishing new writers, new tastes and trends. Between 1959 and his death in 1993 Burgess contributed to newspapers and periodicals around the world: he was provocative, informative, entertaining, extravagant, and always readable. Editor Will Carr presents a wealth of unpublished and uncollected material. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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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. 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. (