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Enderby #1-4

The Complete Enderby : Inside Mr. Enderby, Enderby Outside, the Clockwork Testament, Enderby's Dark Lady

anthony burgess

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Four works including Inside Mr. Enderby, Enderby Outside, The Clockwork Testament, and Enderby's Dark Lady follow the comic poet's encounters with a professional widow, a plagiarizing pop star, and an African-American nightclub singer. Original.

631 pages, Paperback

First published February 1,1963
Series
Enderby

This edition

Format
631 pages, Paperback
Published
January 1, 1996 by Carroll \u0026 Graf Pub
ISBN
9780786702480
ASIN
0786702486
Language
English

More editions

About the author

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anthony burgess

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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).

He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers, a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air. His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire. He composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4.2 / 5.0, 26 votes)
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26 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
s-viv
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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so my version actually didn't have "enderby's dark lady" which is apparently one of the best. there were moments of genius in the first three books, but then also parts i wasn't that into. the character reminded me a lot of ignatius from a confederacy of dunces which is quite possibly the best character ever. a good read but not on par with "a clockwork orange."
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Solemn
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I mostly enjoyed the Enderby tales, however bizarre they did seem at times, and as non-relatable as the character was to me.

I definitely enjoyed the earlier parts more so that the latter, but overall it was a brilliantly odd story in it’s own right.
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AppleIceCream
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Enderby is a poet whose rhymes are often unappreciated by the outside world. He's a guy anyone can relate to. If you're not an Anthony Burgess fan, this book should give you a good start.
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ARK-13
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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hilarious. he loves his art and he just doesn’t understand anything else.
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Vampire94Child
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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For me, F. X. Enderby is one of those memorable characters. He is just as memorable as A Confederacy of Dunces. Enderby is a strange poet who has dyspepsia and writes all his poetry on the toilet. In fact, he was so memorable and funny, I named my cat Enderby.
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ChanEnChong
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I read this to get reacquainted with Burgess before writing an essay on A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. And while my favorite Burgess novel will always be EARTHLY POWERS, this hilarious collection of novels about a largely sexless poet who wants to be left alone is arguably a close second. These novels would absolutely not be published today. They are gritty, scatological, politically incorrect, and completely hilarious. The idea behind Enderby is that here is a valiant poet caught within the decline of Western civilization. It makes SENSE to place him among disgusting pub habitues, thieving poets, and -- in THE CLOCKWORK TESTAMENT -- the impoverished dregs of society as a teacher. Burgess is elitist and often insensitive and pulls no punches. But that's why these books work so well! Reading these books near the end of the pandemic, when even the most gregarious among us are feeling a mite misanthropic, turned out to be perfect timing. It's been said by some that Enderby was a thinly veiled Burgess himself. And one of the reasons we can go along for the ride here is because Enderby himself is honest and self-effacing. He just wants to write his poetry, but the wild vagaries of the world keep shattering his existence in ridiculous but ever more plausible ways. Also, Nicholson Baker shamelessly ripped off Enderby for his Paul Chowder books, sanding all the offensiveness down, and making the reading experience more "palatable." I much prefer the unadulterated Burgess vision. There is an audacious scene in THE CLOCKWORK TESTAMENT in which Enderby confronts a Black Power poem that would probably spawn a thousand hot takes of offense, but it had me howling with laughter in a way that caused me to fall off the bed. So I very much enjoyed these books, although this is not the reading experience for everyone.
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AmbiguousMonster
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I'm blown away by how something so empty can be made so epic and meaningful. Literary heroin, sweet quadruple spoonfuls of postmodern syrup. First of all, Enderby is an arcane character with an entirely plausible yet completely ridiculous set of values. He's a lost cause from the lower middle classes but is a truly towering Literary figure in his relation to great poets and playwrights, which gives him an inner strength that fuels him through all kinds of intensely twisted situations, largely of his own making.

For instance, he's committed to dyspepsia and reflux as a natural mode of life. He often chases those sickly states with cups of whisky, over-caffeinated cups of tea and horrendous sounding British meals that generally involve gross bits of animals stewed or fried in lard. LOL he has his own style of cooking that he cherishes that pretty much rests on that formula.

He's also unable to communicate with anyone except women who temporarily fall in love with him, and other wretched poets from his milieu, because his prose is so dense and his tone and emotional affect so misaligned with acceptable tone that he is immediately seen or heard as forward and suspicious. The sheer brutality and nakedness of the situations being described and that he gets into are awe inspiring.

OTOH his inner intellectual activity, writing poetry and following his inner voice, is really defensible in a literary context, although the fact that he is entirely sexless, just prone to bouts of masturbation and recrimination, as a sacrifice to his muse is very darkly appropriate.

And as a consequence of his idiosyncrasies and perceived depravity, he often finds himself involved with the dregs of society, the places where writers, druggies and pederasts roam free in Morocco, or with gnarly cut-rate butchers, and so on.

Whether Enderby is worthless or worthwhile is, indeed, the seriocomic question the author, readers, Enderby, other characters, and history are all eternally asking themselves. Hilariously the answer is likely a superposition - he's both.

The novels vary in character and tone, I'd say the first two are perfectly poised and positioned, but the latter make interesting commentary on the first two and are awesome in their own way, but more literary fun and games than the visceral crawl into the heart of poetry and how its ideals crash and completely oppose all our modern and many of our ancient values and systems.

You have to be in the right place to take in this dense book. It has you looking up words and references in the dictionary every page or so. Often cackling when you realize how deep and self
referential and fractal they are. A truly wild ride. We will never know if Enderby's poetry was "good" but it will always be great in context within this book!
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No1_LoliLover
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I'm not keen on Dark Lady, I think Burgess should have ended with Clockwork Testament as he originally intended.

If can stand the bit of vulgarity (no more than A Clockwork Orange) Burgess likes to indulge in, then the first two in the trilogy are definitely worth the read.
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