Written between 1960 and 1984, and now collected in one volume, the four 'Enderby' novels are Burgess's finest comic achievement.
Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. He served in the army from 1940 to 1954 before becoming a colonial education officer. It was while he held this post that doctors told him he would die, and he decided to try to live by writing. A prolific and respected author, Burgess died in 1993.
The Enderby series are even finer comedies than those by Evelyn
Waugh
*Gore Vidal*
Ferociously funny and wildly verbally inventive
*The Times*
Burgess is at his most inventive in these books, especially when he
gives us the full text of Enderby's songs and sonnets (many of
which are laughably bad). Poetry, Burgess seems to conclude, is
rather like shitting: it's really about purging oneself of dead
matter
*Observer*
Burgess is the great postmodern storehouse of British writing-an
important experimentalist; an encyclopaedic amasser, but also a
maker of form; a playful comic, with a dark gloom
*Malcolm Bradbury*
No less an authority than Harold Bloom rates the Enderby books
among the great comic fictions of our time. Certainly Anthony
Burgess, that dizzying polymath and flamboyant novelist, never
created a more engaging hero than this hapless poet... All in all,
these four books, though diverse in tone and character, strikingly
exhibit the narrative gusto and linguistic sprezzatura of Anthony
Burgess at his best
*Washington Post*
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