Abba Abba

by Anthony Burgess

A story which presents an interesting what-if proposition concerning two poets, John Keats and Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, who may or may not have met in Rome in 1820-1821. Burgess' other novels include "A Clockwork Orange" and "Earthly Powers".

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Historical Fiction, Novels, Literature, British Literature, 20th Century

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

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 .

Reviews

[Karl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Anthony Burgess's 22nd novel. A Clockwork Orange (1962) was his Ninth.

The theme of the book "ABBA ABBA" concerns itself with the last months in the life of John Keats. In Part One, the poet has various adventures such as meeting the Roman poet, who becomes an acquaintance, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli in the Sistine Chapel, and Pauline Bonaparte the sister of Napoleon, in the Pincio.

Part Two consists of about seventy amusingly blasphemous sonnets by Belli

"Abba Abba" is the epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone, behind which the vessel with his remains is kept, in Monte Carlo.

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't dig cynical books about writers I love and respect. For here Burgess passive-aggressively uploads his bitter absence of positive emotion in life upon an innocent literary titan, John Keats.

I got those same vibes recently about Lesley Blume in Everybody Behaves Badly. Such second fiddles have a habit of perpetually playing off key to irk the concert master!

Sure, Keats was no spring chicken. But his heart was in the right place.

His memory deserves infinitely more respect!

The wonderful writer Sigrid Nunez, in her book The Friend, loudly bewails the habit of some writers - like Anthony Burgess here - to use literature as an angry weapon.

Fortunately, this read was a library loan. I started reading it in late 1973, and returned it next day.

Tell me if I was not glad to get it out of my sight!

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Keats is my favourite poet of all time. Yes, I know, I know. Really? Yeah, he is. When you're seventeen and you read something as grand as Endymion, you're bound to call it love at first read in perpetuity. This book is a quasi Chronicle of Keats last days battling his consumption. We know John Severn was with him throughout the ordeal, often coming between him and his attempt at a graceful suicide using Laudanum, all the while trying to convert him from Atheism. All that's cool and dramatic and well, it's Anthony Burgess, so the writing is bound to be stellar... Up to a point. Don't get me wrong, this is an impressive book no doubt, but I think the book lost its intensity right around the point Keats died. Then it goes on for awhile about Belli, but it's a downhill curve from there, plus all those sonnets at the end, most of them are interesting, quirky and funny, but tend to circle too much around blasphemy. I just feel like those pages would be put to better use telling more of say John Severn's story. Perhaps.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another exuberant folly from Burgess, part rambling reimagining of the end of Keats, part showcase for tedious comic verse. Romping historical fiction with a literary swagger was the domain of Robert Nye in the 1970s, Burgess’s effort is a cut-and-shut job concealed as an experiment.

[Jason Furman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a two-part novella. The first tells of a last days of John Keats in Rome, centered around a fictitious meeting with the Roman dialect poet Belli. The second part, more of an appendix, is a set of Belli’s poems, with the framing device of an introduction by the supposed translator Wilson. It is filled with enormously witty wordplay, deep references to the form and history of the sonnet, and that period in Romantic literature. Most of them went well above my head but I still caught enough to find this an fascinating and enjoyable book. Having read nearly twenty novels by Anthony Burgess, although none in the last fifteen years, this made me hungry for more of them. Maybe re-reading Enderby should be next on my list.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual rate: maybe 3,5

I found this little book in a pretty second-hand bookshop in Bloomsbury, London - exactly as every used-book should be found: totally by chance and cheap enough to be worthy even while looking like something you've never read before and would not usually buy (i've never gotten past the first scene of the a clockwork orange film, i never thought of reading a book by its author). This story is about the last weeks of John Keats in Rome, funnily imagined as tormented by desire and by his thoughts on religion, poetry and language. It is witty and bizarre even in the dramatic nature of the moment, full of italian dialect and bad sonnets - a quick and strange read. Recommended.

[Helie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't bring myself to get through all of Belli's poems (the second half of the book). But the first half was so interesting. I love Keats, so I really enjoyed reading about him as a character (even though it was as he was dying). And his discussions about God and religion and poetry and writing were a really interesting read. Anthony Burgess, what a cool guy.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to read it again. The last days of Keats beautifully presented. It's funny and heartbreaking.

[J.P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, though not entirely satisfactory read. In a nutshell: what if 19th Century British Romantic poet John Keats, while dying in Rome of T.B. in 1820-21, had met Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli? Would they have influenced each other's poetry? Would they have been friends? These are the two basic premises underlying Anthony Burgess' novella.

And Burgess, best known as the author of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, crafts an intriguing little tale (just 84 pages long) in answering the two questions. The finest scenes depict Keats, at the height of his poetical powers, chafing against the tuberculosis which is robbing him of the energy with which to use them. Burgess skillfully and realistically portrays the frustration of a young (age 25) poet who realizes his time on earth is running out. Touching, also, are the scenes between atheist Keats and his devout Christian/devoted caretaker, Joseph Severn. Their dialogues regarding Keats' soul and the existence of an afterlife are provocatively, though tastefully, done.

Likewise interesting are the chapters in which Keats and Belli meet and discuss their art, via the interpretations of Italian- and English-speaking friends. There's respect for two men who recognize each other as brother poets, but conversely, something of a professional rivalry which comes with youth. Most intriguing is Burgess' notion that it was Keats who inspired Belli to capture the life and atmosphere of the city of Rome using the city's native dialect in the sonnet form. Keats, though, realizes he won't live to complete the endeavor; also, being a foreigner, he knows the task is best left to a native Roman. That's where Belli comes in.

The problem is, this book is plagued by a "Big Deal" quality. Unless one is a big fan of Keats and/or Belli, one has a difficult time getting too revved up about this subject matter. Burgess seems to take the reader's enthusiasm in his subject(s) for granted. The novelist does little to reel in or set the stage for the casual reader. Oftentimes, reading this book was like watching a foreign film without subtitles.

Another issue is the book's brevity. This project should've been expanded to the full length of a novel. If Burgess had had the space and opportunity to truly recreate the era, place and people of ABBA ABBA, a la a historical novel, it would've led to a more satisfying reading experience. As it stands, this slim novella gives the reader little more than a suggestion of its time and place and, with a few exceptions, thumbnail sketches of its characters.

The second half of ABBA ABBA is devoted to English translations of Belli's Roman dialect sonnets regarding his native city and fellow citizens. While Burgess creates a fictional framework to connect the translations to the preceding novella, the deciphering was actually done by the author himself. Burgess seems to have been quite proud of them. I don't mean to rob Burgess of his pride. I don't mean to suggest that Belli's sonnets don't have artistic merit. But again, unless you're really into this sort of thing. . .the "ho-hum" factor is often hard to overcome. As translated, Belli's poems seem to be little more than vulgar limericks slanted toward a very specific place and time, i.e., 19th century Rome.

So I won't say that ABBA ABBA is unworthy of readers' time. There's a nice little mystery here involving the meaning of the book's title which keeps one guessing until the end. And Burgess' sympathetic portrayal of John Keats alone earned this book its third star in my rating. But ultimately, one wishes Burgess would've gone all the way and written a complete novel. In current form, ABBA ABBA reads like a cursory sketch rendered to justify a collection of Burgess' Belli translations.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The novel is brilliant, really captures Keats' character in crisis. Burgess understands his thinking and metamorphoses that into the language of Keats' dialogue, interior and social, conjured by way of Joyce but still keeping to the historical period. The poet's relationship with Joseph Severn is particularly well realized, so much so that it is hard for me to imagine that it was not as Burgess paints it. Belli, a poet I'd never heard of, is a fascinatingly divided character, who mirrors Keats darkly. Burgess's translations of his poems are less successful than the fictional section of the book-- a little too elaborately Joycean, but important in putting the sonnets on the English reader's map.

[Anthony Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't know what to make of this, but I enjoyed the linguistic richness and playfulness.

Dying Keats meets foul-mouthed and blasphemous Popish censor and Roman sonneteer, Giuseppe Belli. So what? Burgess' translations of Belli's sonnets are amusingly inventive.

Or is Belli just a fiction? I don't know. It was a bit beyond me, so any illumination will be welcome.

[Marina]

Future Marina: at least chekc it out! from David Lodge's

[mkfs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty decent telling of Keats' last days in Rome.
Not sure Part II, a translation of Belli's poems, was either warranted or enjoyable.

[Howard · Rating 2 out of 5]

A short novella and a bonus translation of Belli 73 (rhyming ABBA ABBA format) poems as a series around a jovial and bawdy take on the bible (Genesis to Jesus).

The first is Burgess imagined dialogue of Keats and Belli on life, poetry etc.

I really like Burgess (Earthly Powers, Enderby, Clockwork, M/F etc) but this was just too highbrow for me; a readable dialogue perhaps but not really liking or 'getting' poetry Keats or any, meant at every line I felt I was missing something clever.

Ironically I was on the verge of not bothering with the Belli section but soon realized the poems were fun, accessible and quite philosophical.

"Rejoice, because the Lord's eternal love
Has made you pregnant - not by orthodox
Methods, of course. The Pentecostal Dove
Came when you slept and nested in your box."
"A hen?" she blushed, "for I know nothing of -"
The Angel nodded, knowing she meant cocks.

[Igal · Rating 4 out of 5]

A interesting story to read, especially if you're visiting Rome. It captures the last days of the poet Keats, who lived in some rooms right on the Spanish steps in 1820. It was the Rome of the popes then, because there was no nation of Italy yet. There wasn't even an official Italian language yet, just dialects.

The story fictionalizes a meeting between Keats and G.G. Belli, a historically real Italian poet who worked for the papacy and was torn between his religion and his love of the irreligious Roman culture of the streets. Keats was a Romantic poet, not at all interested in being religious, and the contrast between the 2 of them is well done.

The book also contains some translated poems of Belli, and in an afterward tells the story of how this little-known Roman poet came to have his poems translated in 20th-century America.

If you like language and poetry, this is a good short read.

[T Palmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, from one of Britain's great 20th century writers and thinkers, was almost relegated to 2 stars. A short confusing book about language, poetry, priests, God and the tensions between man's 'higher and lower selves': ostentatious scholarship, lofty ideas, childish vulgarity and provocative blasphemy. A panoply of barely introduced characters adds to that confusion.
But in the introduction to part two, the scholarship is explained and the characters introduced and it made a bit more sense.
This book is another reminder how little Christian religion there is in contemporary Britain and a book railing against the suffocating control of the Church, beginning with its dislike of vulgarity in which the vis vitae is basely rooted (parody?), is no longer relevant.

[Lana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This conflicting piece of literature, part enchanting prose, part translated obscene poetry, offers up a pretty fantasy. The first part of the book is a wonderful musing upon a popular, romantic figures death, and how he deals with it. The second part are layman's poetry, which at first are a refreshing offset to stuffier poetry, however, like stuffier poetry, these short poems become quite repetitive in their imagery and their shock tactic of appropriating the bible into blasphemous speech. These poems are best taken few and far between.

[Barak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange little book... dealing imaginatively with the last 2-3 months of Keats' life, when he is in Rome, supposedly to recover (though just the journey to get from England to Italy was a killer in its own right) and then get back to Fanny & Fanny...

Deceptively, not an easy read, but hey, any book with John Keats as a character must have some merit, and some in fact are truly excellent (I am thinking of Dan Simmons' Hyperion here)

Spoiler - the hero dies at the end (but won't we all, with or without a Hellenistic vase?)

[Eddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a fan of John Keats, a short historical fiction novel about him at the end of his life definitely was appealing to me. The plot is very basic and sees the two characters discuss life and God. The second half of the book is a collection of poems. The book is a very short read with an interesting concept, but ultimately does not have much meat to it.

[T.S.S. Fulk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun language play with a fictional account of Keats's last days.

[Sheena · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, rounded up.

[SirFrankieCrisp]

Burgess, the great consolidator of literature, writes, most endearingly, for us bibliophiles - and to that I am grateful

[Tony Hannan]

2. Abba Abba, by Anthony Burgess. Love a bit of Burgess, such a playful and creative writer. Literature as puzzle. 7/10

[Glass River]

Abba Abba was written during a period of his career when Burgess had become the darling of the literary theorists – attention he relished rather more than most novelists do. In its first half, the story centres on the last months of the poet Keats spitting out his lifeblood in Rome, accompanied, as he historically was, by the artist Joseph Severn. One of the principal conclusions Burgess’ novel comes to is that the writer, like wine, needs decades of lived existence to progress from precocious brilliance to seasoned maturity. It’s not a young man’s game. At one point in Abba Abba Keats, barely out of boyhood, is conducted round the Sistine Chapel to wonder at what Michelangelo achieved in his later years. His guide is a friend he has made in Rome, Giovanni Gulielmi. In the chapel, he encounters the local poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. Keats died in his mid-twenties. What would he have done given seventy more years of writing life? Or even the seventy-two in total that Belli enjoyed?
Keats’ brief encounter with Rome (in Burgess’ version) thrusts into prominence two other needful things: dirt and sex. The poet’s own name, as mangled by local dialect, comes out as cazzo – slang for penis. It inspires a Keatsian vers d’occasion:
Here are some names, my son, we call the prick:
The chair, the yard, the nail, the kit, the cock,
The holofernes, rod, the sugar rock,
The dickory dickory dock, the liquorice stick.
It goes on (Burgess always does go on) cataloguing penis synonymy for many lines more. More years of life, and more hanky-panky (something of which he had been sadly starved by the Brawne woman), and Keats would have been an author in the Burgess class, we apprehend. He himself was a ripe sixty years old at the time of writing Abba Abba. Why the odd title? A repetition of ‘Abba’, as in the above penile quatrain, is the rhyme scheme of the first octave of the sonnet – a form used by both English and Italian poets. It is also the Aramaic ejaculation (‘Lord, Lord!’) of the dying Christ on the Cross. Christ, like Keats, was taken early. The second half of Abba Abba comprises English translations of some seventy Belli sonnets by John Wilson, a descendant of Keats’ friend Giovanni Gulielmi (i.e. John Wilson), whose C.V. is precisely that of Anthony Burgess, whose birth-name was John Anthony Burgess Wilson.
ABBA was also, of course, a Swedish pop group, formed in 1972, the name assumed as an acronym of the initials of their Christian names. After winning the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest Abba had a string of hits in the mid-1970s. ‘Mamma Mia’ was in 1975 particularly popular in Italy, where Burgess was resident. In 1977 one would have had to be immured in a dungeon in the Château d’If with an iron mask on one’s head not to have known about the Swedish songsters. Constitutionally mischievous, Burgess certainly did. ABBA is also a palindrome for the initial letters of ‘Anthony Burgess Burgess Anthony’. Clever, clever.

[Avd.Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title refers to the first eight lines, the octave, of the standard Italian or Petrarchian sonnet.
As is often the case in Burgess work, this short novel is a blend of fact and fiction.
Two poets live in Rome in 1821. One is the English poet John Keats, who is slowly dying of consumption; and we follow him in his last days of life. The other poet is the Italian Giuseppe Belli, a Vatican censor, who is writing blasphemous sonnets in Roman gutter slang in his spare time. A selection of Bellis sonnets translated into English by Burgess, can be found in the second part of the book. The first part is about the what if__ the two poets had met. I liked this book. It was funny and moving.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Keats but it was hard to get into this book. The idea is completely conjectural, of his final days dying in Rome, and so speculative. Likewise, the second half of the book purported to be the Belli translations, were not so interesting, they pretend to a paraphrasing of the Bible for a more vulgar society, but seem more meant to shock than Keats, himself somewhat someone of more discretion, might have said as to any of it. I see Keats as a more ethereal being, after all, and I felt that the set of poems which make up part two do not lend well with being paired to the one "whose name was writ in water."

[Blanca · Rating 5 out of 5]

The premise is genius. This story supposes the end of John keats young life and his chance meetings with of all people, Pauline Bonaparte and an erotic Italian poet.

Burgess' imitations of the poetry collaborated between Keats and the Italian are funny and cheeky. It's worth visiting the wikipedia entery for him which goes into detail on his prolific writing in critical essays, translations, journalism and two children's books which I have read and are whimsical. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_...]

[Vanyo666 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and enjoyable for humour and obvious wit, the novel part, despite my utter lack of knowledge of the poets in question and their work. I am probably not Burgess' intended reader and like others before me I did find the second part required several sittings to take in and enjoy.

[Al Maki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brings Keat's death to life?? Well, it does actually. It also introduced me to another sonnet writer who's also worth reading: Giuseppe Gioachino Belli.

[Leeknowscatsitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love John Keats and Italy.