The second volume of Burgess's autobiography begins in 1959 with the
author's return to England from Brunei and - after the mistaken prognosis which
gave him a year to live - the start of his professional writing career. It ends
in 1982 with the centenary celebrations of James Joyce's birth.Taking up where Little Wilson and Big God left off, You've Had Your Time is
the second volume of Anthony Burgess's autobiography. It begins in 1959, with
the author's return from Brunei, and the start of a long and prolific writing
career, and ends, somewhat arbitrarily, in 1982, with the centenary
celebrations of the birth of James Joyce, which prompt Burgess to certain
conclusions about the relationship between literature and life. Full of
extraordinary vignettes (Borges and Burgess conducting a conversation in
Anglo-Saxon, for example), as rich, varied and hectic as the nomadic literary
life it describes, this is the astonishingly frank autobiography of an
extraordinary literary genius. Rarely, if ever, has a writer exposed his inner
life so completely and rarely has a writer's life been described - by anyone -
with such vigour, polymathic humour and linguistic verve.
