Nothing Like the Sun

This book is thrilling for readers who bemoan the increasing simplicity of language favored in modern fiction. When we reduce our prose to something any eight-year-old could understand, we lose much of the precise nuance and shades of color that are the great gifts of our language...we don't have the natural prosody of Italian or Spanish; we lack the exquisite structural evasions that make French so perfect for courtier and diplomat; we cannot create great centipedes of sewn-together meaning like German. But English is an incredibly rich language, a hodgepodge, a portmanteau, a thief and a wily borrower, and with the effortless bravura natural to a linguist and translator of high caliber, Burgess exploits every gift that English offers him, with a dazzling result that is a mosaic composed of everything from diamonds of the first water to thrown-away bits of aluminum foil.Secondary to this pleasure of language is Burgess' fantastic knowledge of his subject; those educated about the Elizabethan and early Jacobean age, and who have a lot of Shakespeare rolling around in their heads, will be stunned and delighted. The story is, however, a boat swept along on a great tide of language, and if you are sometimes unwilling to be carried along without some idea of where this all is leading, you may find yourself frustrated. Your craft will run awkwardly aground here and there, and although your helmsman navigates adeptly enough, you may be vexed by your own inability to tell a crocodile from a fallen log. Wipe the spray off your compass and put it away; you're along for the ride, and the destination is perhaps less important than your willingness to drown a little.

The only novel about Shakespeare that does anything like justice to its subject, because Burgess was one of the great English stylists of the century and he knew that the only way to get to Shakespeare's personality and writing life was by stealing a lot from Shakespeare himself and then letting his quasi-Joycean style take over from there. Remember, though, that this is a novel and makes no bones about being an "accurate" biography. Burgess is extremely fanciful, which makes for a fascinating novel. One of my favorites, which I've read now four times, including the excellently narrated audiobook.

Only for true Shakespeare Disciples!

One of the most beautifully written and brilliantly conceived novels I have ever read. An Anthony Burgess tale has never dissapointed me. This book and the Napoleon Symphony are the two most entertaining and inventive works works of historical/biographical fiction since I, Claudius.

Scholar or newcomer, this book grabs you and you feel every happiness or pain the characters do, whether you intended to or not.

Burgess knows Shakespeare deeply enough--his research was in this area, and destroyed by a bomb in the blitz--to cause you to believe that this is the life WS lived.

somewhat dusappointing

Great use of language and a refreshingly new take on Shakespeare's life.