MF

by Anthony Burgess

Book Overview

Kicked out of college and harassed by his lawyer, Miles Faber abandons New York and embarks on a defiant pilgrimage across the Caribbean to find the shrine of Sib Legeru, an obscure poet and painter.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394436083
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

M/F

Miles Faber, Male and Female, and finally, the north american slang that is too profane to be written. These are all the incorporated subtitles of this title. M/F is the adventure of a young man whose history bears much resemblence to that of Sophocles' King Oedipus, combined with an anciet north american fairy tale of the Algonquin Indians, though neither are necessary to know to enjoy this wonderful novel. Mr. Burgess is at his most minimilistic and concise, stylistically, and as usual hilarious, in this at times disturbing story. As the opening few quotations suggest, this novel is about territory within human relations, as well as art, and territory that eventually leads into incest,chaos, and disorder. However, incest is not the real theme of the novel, but rather the mask for the theme of miscommunication. We follow Miles Faber from his old university(from which he is recently expelled) to New York to a small, secluded island springing from the prolific imagination of Mr. Burgess. And as he encounters one adventure after another, all of which bear some resemblence to the above mentioned literary allusions, as well as the bible, the theme of the novel is highlighted in the somewhat questionable sticky canvas' of Roshumberg, the graffity blasting a politic Norman Mailer, as well as others in the search of another prolific poet, writer, composer and artist who has yet to be discovered. What he discovers instead is the difference between youthful ambitions of chaos in art with that of the structure that all genuine art must be supported with. As Mr. Burgess has previously shown, youth is concerned with destruction (A Clockwork Orange ), whereas maturity is the offspring of order. It is a fine thing to think about bringing something new to art or life and living when one is young, but to ignore established practices without attempting to understand them is, well, youthful, and the result of inexperience or lack of imagination. Through a maze of delightful riddles and connundrums, Miles reaches some sense of what art and life are about, coming to disregard the youthful preoccupatin with chaos and destruction. Incest eventually breeds a defective strain, as chaos in art breeds the destruction of order, the order of all that is best in mankind, love, duty, faith, shame, pity, home, hope, et cetera.

AB's Best

I recall reading an interview with Anthony Burgess in which he bemoaned the critical reception that "M/F" received upon its publication, and one can certainly see the point of his complaint. It is a small, highly original masterpiece that was unjustly dismissed as a frivolous exercise in intellectual faddishness. It is certainly not that; indeed, "M/F" is probably the best example of Anthony Burgess' manic, protean genius. Language, art, and myth are stirred together in a structualist stew and the resulting dish is as familiar as fish and chips and as strange as roasted Orang. This, of course, was the whole point of the structualist enterprise; to reveal the commonplace in the exotic and the exotic in the commonplace, and Burgess has great fun playing with this idea as he puts Miles Faber through his comic paces in Manhattan and Grencija (I hope I've spelt that right . . .) Don't be deceived by the book's slender size; it is a marvel of linguistic invention that repays numerous rereadings. And don't be discouraged the fact it is currently out of print; it's fairly easy to find in used book stores and it is certainly worth the effort to track down a copy. "M/F" is perhaps not of Nabokovian excellence, but it's very close. Highly recommended

MF: A Linguistic Game in a Mythological Context

I have read MF at least three times, along with most of Burgess novels. I found it very interesting, not for the plot, but for all the linguistic clues and mythological references that an attentive reader can cautch in it. We can start to play just from the title, MF, apparentely two letters of the alphabet but with a deeper meaning underneath. First of all MF are the initials of the first and last name of the main character, Miles Faber. " Miles" in Latin means "solder" and " Faber" means "artist". The term "solder" brings up the idea of distruption, death , while "artist" joints itself with something positive, with life. So in this two letters we have one the main themes of the novel, evil and good, dark and light, that dualism that is part of everyman's life. MF stays also for Male/ Female, another important theme so loved by Burgess. And I should keep on with many other clues, but I leave the readers to have fun in finding them and high recomanded the reading of others Burgess books. I think he is one of the best novelist of our century, unfortunately not always he has got the right appraisal he deserves. I also suggest the rading of the Irish writer James Joyce, Burgess "grande maestro".