You've Had Your Time: Second Part of the Confessions
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.