Mf [Hardcover]

Anthony Burgess (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd; First Edition edition (June 17, 1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0224618458
• ISBN-13: 978-0224618458
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,829,025 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anthony Burgess (25th February 1917-22nd November 1993) was one of the UK's leading academics and most respected literary figures. A prolific author, during his writing career Burgess found success as a novelist, critic, composer, playwright, screenwriter, travel writer, essayist, poet and librettist, as well as working as a translator, broadcaster, linguist and educationalist. His fiction also includes NOTHING LIKE THE SUN, a recreation of Shakespeare's love-life, but he is perhaps most famous for the complex and controversial novel A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, exploring the nature of evil. Born in Manchester, he spent time living in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe as well as in England, until his death in 1993.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AB's Best, May 18, 2001

By 

Mark Bennett (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mf (Hardcover)

I recall reading an interview with Anthony Burgess in which he bemoaned the critical reception that "M/F" received upon its publication, and one can certainly see the point of his complaint. It is a small, highly original masterpiece that was unjustly dismissed as a frivolous exercise in intellectual faddishness. It is certainly not that; indeed, "M/F" is probably the best example of Anthony Burgess' manic, protean genius. Language, art, and myth are stirred together in a structualist stew and the resulting dish is as familiar as fish and chips and as strange as roasted Orang. This, of course, was the whole point of the structualist enterprise; to reveal the commonplace in the exotic and the exotic in the commonplace, and Burgess has great fun playing with this idea as he puts Miles Faber through his comic paces in Manhattan and Grencija (I hope I've spelt that right . . .) Don't be deceived by the book's slender size; it is a marvel of linguistic invention that repays numerous rereadings. And don't be discouraged the fact it is currently out of print; it's fairly easy to find in used book stores and it is certainly worth the effort to track down a copy. "M/F" is perhaps not of Nabokovian excellence, but it's very close. Highly recommended

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars M/F, April 24, 2002

By 

Rick Maushund (southern california) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mf (Hardcover)

Miles Faber, Male and Female, and finally, the north american slang that is too profane to be written. These are all the incorporated subtitles of this title.
M/F is the adventure of a young man whose history bears much resemblence to that of Sophocles' King Oedipus, combined with an anciet north american fairy tale of the Algonquin Indians, though neither are necessary to know to enjoy this wonderful novel.
Mr. Burgess is at his most minimilistic and concise, stylistically, and as usual hilarious, in this at times disturbing story. As the opening few quotations suggest, this novel is about territory within human relations, as well as art, and territory that eventually leads into incest,chaos, and disorder. However, incest is not the real theme of the novel, but rather the mask for the theme of miscommunication. We follow Miles Faber from his old university(from which he is recently expelled) to New York to a small, secluded island springing from the prolific imagination of Mr. Burgess. And as he encounters one adventure after another, all of which bear some resemblence to the above mentioned literary allusions, as well as the bible, the theme of the novel is highlighted in the somewhat questionable sticky canvas' of Roshumberg, the graffity blasting a politic Norman Mailer, as well as others in the search of another prolific poet, writer, composer and artist who has yet to be discovered. What he discovers instead is the difference between youthful ambitions of chaos in art with that of the structure that all genuine art must be supported with. As Mr. Burgess has previously shown, youth is concerned with destruction (A Clockwork Orange ), whereas maturity is the offspring of order. It is a fine thing to think about bringing something new to art or life and living when one is young, but to ignore established practices without attempting to understand them is, well, youthful, and the result of inexperience or lack of imagination.
Through a maze of delightful riddles and connundrums, Miles reaches some sense of what art and life are about, coming to disregard the youthful preoccupatin with chaos and destruction. Incest eventually breeds a defective strain, as chaos in art breeds the destruction of order, the order of all that is best in mankind, love, duty, faith, shame, pity, home, hope, et cetera.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bizarre/Burgess, December 13, 2010

By 

logosapiens - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: M/F (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)

I felt sorry for this book. Cursed with a strange cover depicting a green [...] shaped jello. "But it is Burgess" I said in a mood of morose determination and macabre curiosity. "So it goes..." as Vonnegut was fond of saying...so I reviewed the book.

Miles Faber, kicked out of college, mugged in New York departs on a demented voyage to a factious Caribbean island via a homosexual piloted yacht after being told that his two parents were siblings. The plot is unimportant- a verbally verdant aimless lurid land languidly written by a linguist.

Burgess, the composer, punctuates his story with cryptic musical notes that dot the tale much like Vonnegut's graphics in BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS. Gilbert Adair's introduction celebrates the "referential grid" of layer upon layer of acrostic sentences and ancient Saxon slang double meanings. Is this a story meant to convey a thought or a story intended to tangle the reader in a greenhouse of beautiful word growth? Perhaps it is a painting that exists to advertise its canvas.

Burgess has always caused me to wonder whether worldview influences writing style. Did the reactionary royalist in Burgess choose to write in rococo madness or was he predestined to do so by his politics?

Was the utilitarian writing of George Orwell (POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE) as much a function of his concern about adequate showers for miners(ROAD TO WIGAN PIER)as his professed desire for clarity or was it just sublimated socialism in the end that created Orwell's writing genius?

The Russian slang in CLOCKWORK ORANGE works to describe future Soviet England, yet here we have junk jargon that adds nothing to a story that exists to display words...a rush of rococo madness.Lot's lurid incest tale in Genesis 19 is far better written and it is God's Word...even Nietzche read the Bible.

In any case, I felt sorry for this book with its pretentious [...] jello picture and no reviews. "Jellif" a cryptic failed trade name for Jello(?), proffered by a drug dealing circus owner who appears near the end of M/F. Jellif pops up randomly like a stubborn garden fungus to dot the pages of this book.

Jellif... perhaps a symbol for incest, itself as mysterious and irrelevant as this book.