The 3 best books by Anthony Burgess

The quarry of writers One Hit Wonder (single hit) is inexhaustible. Anthony Burgess belongs to this battalion that could lead JD Salinger, Patrick Süskind o Harper Lee.

But in this heterogeneous group there are cases and cases. Since the aforementioned Salinger, who on not a few occasions was repudiated and underestimated his Catcher in the rye, until the Süskind whose El fragrance it was being included as reading for boys from around the world in high schools.

Burgess was a writer before his hit A Clockwork Orange and it remained so after Kubrick decided to make the script of his novel into a film a decade after it was written.

So Burgess's membership in the One Hit Wonder It happens to be something occasional, nothing prefabricated or orchestrated from some unprecedented marketing operation, nor the result of that opportunism or opportunity with which some novels make their way. Neither Burgess began to write with her Clockwork Orange nor did she stop doing so after the cinematographic glory that rediscovered her for the whole world.

So in Burgess we have an author always to be discovered in his more than twenty works and leaps towards dramaturgy, essays and articles. A writer who contains many versions of himself, from the subversive point of his peak work to a certain black aspect and even works that cut between the fantastic and the surreal.

Top 3 Recommended Books by Anthony Burgess

A Clockwork Orange

What to say about A Clockwork Orange that you no longer know? If anything, insist that reading such a work is even more recommended if possible. Because in his masterpiece in duplicate of Kubrick in the direction the rawness is chewed on us while in this novel it is us and our imagination that must process everything written.

And in a work as powerful as this the issue is much wilder, the images reach even further from those descriptions and psychological brushstrokes that the screen never reaches. It is not a question of finding the matter more morbid, it is a question of rediscovering the purity of the most transgressive group, like 1984 by George Orwell passed in the middle of a lysergic acid trip.

A Clockwork Orange tells the story of teenage nadsat Alex and his three druggies-friends in a world of cruelty and destruction. Alex has the main human attributes: love of aggression, love of language, love of beauty.

But he is young and has not yet understood the true importance of freedom, which he enjoys in a violent way. In a certain sense he lives in Eden, and only when he falls (as indeed happens to him, from a window) does he seem able to transform into a true human being.

Napoleonic symphony

If we look closely, in history, the most insignificant and sometimes even ridiculous-looking types always ended up as great dictators. What to say about Hitler ... or Franco.

But here we focus on Napoleon and his ulcer. A guy with the appearance of a humorist making a caricature of some glorious military man. Burgess also had it between eyebrows to tell us this story.

Here is Napoleon stripped of official paraphernalia; a visionary and delusional man who laughs, screams and kicks, surrounded by a cohort of loathsome characters: from Corsican relatives to marshals, grumpy Old Guard veterans, or Barras, Telleyrand, Madame de Stäel and countless others.

And the fickle and unfaithful Josefina? Paradoxically, she is for the emperor the only haven of peace, eternity and true love. A tragicomic symphony in four movements, with an overture to Josephine and a coda to Universal History that takes Beethoven's Eroica as a model to create an irreverent, fun and brilliant work where Burgess casually displays all his virtuosity and erudition. The result is a Napoleon so alive that the reader has the impression of having met him.

Hesitation

Perhaps it was a matter of compensating for the acid reflection of the world of a clockwork orange. Or perhaps to move away precisely from a novel so stigmatizing for its author.

And yet the poles end up attracting each other. Because in the satirical humor that Burgess displays in this novel we detect that same ultimate intention of mockery in the face of formality.

Denis Hillier, a spy for the English Secret Service, reluctantly accepts one last mission before retiring from duty. He must find and kidnap Roper, his childhood friend, a scientist who has deserted and, in the middle of the Cold War, has gone to the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The novel becomes a true caricature of the espionage genre, with a scruffy, clueless and disastrous anti-hero whose image is far removed from the cold, smart and efficient spy we are used to.

In a masterful way, Burgess tells us an intense and suspenseful story, which becomes a description of the tortuous cold war that he had to witness, and an entire ethical reflection.