You've Had Your Time: Second Part of the Confessions [Hardcover]

Anthony Burgess (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Although this is the second volume of Burgess's autobiographical confessions (with an authorial nod to St. Augustine and Rousseau), it stands on its own. (The first volume was Little Wilson and Big God , LJ 2/15/87.) Covering the years from 1959 to 1982, Burgess has his say on life as a language-obsessed novelist and critic and also takes the opportunity to respond vociferously to his critics. He moves around the world at a blurring pace, writing and translating fiction, drama, and poetry while experiencing the machinations of an alcoholic marriage and the appearance of a former lover/future wife seemingly out of nowhere with his heretofore unknown son. Especially fascinating and lively are his accounts of the creation of the book and the film of A Clockwork Or ange and his translation of Cyrano de Ber gerac . Highly recommended.
- Janice Braun, Medical Historical Lib., Yale Univ.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 403 pages
• Publisher: Grove Pr (March 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802114059
• ISBN-13: 978-0802114051
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,007,538 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

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finding Lost Time, December 1, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: You've Had Your Time: Second Part of the Confessions (Hardcover)

I stumbled across Burgess's autobiography in a mail-order catalogue of remaindered books. _You've Had Your Time_ cost half as much as the shipping and handling, and was read with the kind of joy and guilt one feels when finding a stray twenty-dollar bill in an empty parking lot.

What struck me about Burgess on Burgess is his delight in words---utilitarian words, pretty words, obscene words, latinates, any combination thereof (among his favorites: micturate). He called his art a craft, and loved to show the clockwork behind prose-tricks, how even the most magical books depend heavily on sleight-of-hand. Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of his autobiography is how sketchy it is on the author's life and how detailed it is on words. For him, at least, the two are inseparable.

Anthony Burgess, aspiring composer, is told at 35 that he has an inoperable brain tumor---he will die within a year. He cranks a sheet of paper into a typewriter. Jump a few decades ahead. In 1989 we find him reflecting on Joyce's anniversary, on conversations in Saxon with Borges, on Kubrick's version of _A Clockwork Orange_, and on a bitter scene from a childhood he can't quite call his own.

He wrote over thirty novels, and also adapted, translated, and commented on a dizzying array of subjects. He was very, very funny. He was at his funniest when writing on his life. And yet there is this terrible, self-inflicted sense of failure when he looks back: The last line in his book is both defiant and defeated---time is creeping up on him, he says, and his attitude is not that of a complacent man of letters, but rather that of someone with an awful lot of unfinished business.

Here's the punchline: In-between the completion of the memoir and his death he wrote an additional six books. The last one, a novel in verse, has just come out. Burgess cheated death at the beginning of his literary career and has done so again.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A writer's life, January 20, 2005

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: You've Had Your Time: Second Part of the Confessions (Hardcover)

Burgess first great ambition was to be a composer of classical music. His success, fame and reputation however came largely through the writing career he began only when diagnosed with a condition which told him he only had a year to live. In that year in order to provide his first wife with some kind of financial security he wrote five novels. He also was cured of the tumor and went on to become one of the most prolific, energetic, and linguistically inventive novelists and critics of the latter half of the twentieth century. In this second part of his biography he tells the story of his writing life and career, of his second marriage, of the birth of his son , of the innumerable travels, meetings and connections which he makes in the course of his extremely productive life. The book is written with his usual verve and linguistic inventiveness. It is an interesting and even breathtaking at first but it eventually wore me down with its multiplication of meetings and deals and new characters and events. In truth I was looking for something deeper and more reflective, something which would too give a more insightful look into Burgess' sense of his own art. With all this I would say it provides a great deal of information and incident about one of the most inventive writers linguistically of the latter half of the century.
It is certainly worth a read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Moving and thoughtful, June 7, 2009

By 

G. Miller "seekingperspective" (New York City) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: You've Had Your Time: Second Part of the Confessions (Hardcover)

Burgess is best known for fiction--Clockwork Orange--but his memoirs and his nonfiction were extraordinary. Read these, as well as his tribute to James Joyce, Re Joyce, and your life will be enhanced. Honest.