Clockwork Testament or: Enderby's End By Anthony Burgess
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Ákos Farkas is an associate professor at the School of English and American Studies (SEAS) of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE)First published in 1974, this novel is a semi-autobiographical reflection on the author’s experience of having been the subject of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange in 1971. This is the end of Enderby, Anthony Burgess’s finest comic creation. Dyspeptic and obese, this is the account of his last day as a visiting professor in New York, and his last day on Earth.
The Irwell Edition of The Clockwork Testament will provide new information about the genesis of the novel, gleaned from a series of drafts and typescripts recently discovered in the archive of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation (IABF) in Manchester, as well as printing a deleted chapter for the first time in English.
General Editors’ foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
THE CLOCKWORK TESTAMENT
Appendices
1. French Overture
2. ‘American Policies in Vietnam’
3. Outlines of three novels
4. Reader’s report on The Clockwork Testament
5. ‘The Nature of Violence’
Notes
Enter Enderby, his old quirky self, feeding on cream cakes and sausages and fighting his dyspepsia with a mysterious black draught from his Chinese pharmacist, lecturing on (imaginary) Elizabethan dramatists while berating his students for their slothful ignorance, disrupting the dismal routine of late-night talk shows and working on his epic poem (at his desk, not on his toilet as of old) based on the life of the heretic Pelagius.
And exit Enderby (alas), ambushed by his bad heart in alien, malevolent New York. Hollywood has twisted his idea for a film based on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland into a movie that surpasses even A Clockwork Orange as a horrorshow extravaganza. Enderby himself is the subject of attack on all sides, by college students, subway muggers, and press pundits. And finally – fatally – the woman from Poughkeepsie who shows up late one night with copies of his books, a gun, and a grievance.
Enderby, the ‘desperately innocent observer’ of Anthony Burgess’s Inside Mr Enderby and Enderby Outside, is on his last, valiant, buckling legs, lunging away at New York – and all American culture – in a last-ditch defence of Art, Original Sin, and Proper Nourishment.