The Complete Enderby : Inside Mr. Enderby, Enderby Outside, the Clockwork Testament, Enderby's Dark Lady
Anthony Burgess
Language: English
Pages: 630
ISBN: 0786702486
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Collected here for the first time under one cover are the four novels featuring Anthony Burgess's greatest comic creation, the perdurable poet F.X. Enderby. "With the most offhand, scurrilous charm, Burgess illustrates (how Enderby the artist) is the man who expresses for all men their unbuttoned true selves".--Time.
the faith burned hot. Then he noticed something he had not seen before – little verse couplets hanging on the wall behind the bar. He had time to read one only before going to the lavatory before going upstairs. It said: Si bebes para olvidar, Paga antes de empezar. That, thought Enderby, meant that if you drank to forget you’d better pay before you began. Drinking and forgetting, that was. Enderby felt a bit cold. Verse and treachery went together. He hadn’t thought of it before, but Napo
money part of his brain grew suddenly delirious, lifelong abstainer fed with sudden gin. He trembled as with the prospect of sexual outrage. ‘A thousand dollars,’ he said. They stared at him. ‘There,’ he said. And then: ‘Somewhere in that region anyway. I’m not what you’d call a greedy man.’ ‘We might manage five hundred,’ Schaumwein’s assistant-friend said. ‘On delivery, of course. Provided that it’s what might be termed satisfactory.’ ‘Seven hundred and fifty,’ Enderby said. ‘I’m not what
kind of jeering, and then I went back up and was taking a shower, and I said the hell with it, I’m going to where my friend is, so I got my bags taken down and I put on my raincoat and. If I take it off,’ she suddenly began to giggle, ‘you’ll see the real me, kid. Divine fundament and all.’ ‘You mean,’ Enderby gulped, ‘straight out of the bath, shower I mean, ridiculous unclean American custom, and and.’ His body stiffened except for one member, which couched morbidly flaccid. ‘I see.’ He added,
Mr Holden. Hogg looked around, seeing John the Spaniard and the three Albanian waiters from the Sweet Thames Run Softly bar downstairs all looking terrible in coarse golliwog toupees that were meant to be a kind of homage, so Hogg understood, to an enviable aspect of youth typified by those blasphemous obscenities – namely, a riotous and sickening excess of head-hair. Hogg picked up his own wig and crammed it on. He did not like what he saw in the mirrored reredos. He seemed to resemble very much
in the singing green Of sycamore and riot-running chestnut and oak That squandered flame, cut a thousand arteries and bled Flood after summer flood, spawned an obscene Unquenched unstanchable green world sea, to choke The fainting air, drown sun in its skywise tread.’ It was being read wretchedly, as though the reader were decoding it from ill-learnt Cyrillic. Yod Crewsy now said: ‘Me teeth is slipping a bit.’ Laughter. ‘I can write em but I can’t say em. Anyway, here’s how it finishes: