- Abba Abba
Infobox_Book |
name = Abba Abba
image_caption =
author =Anthony Burgess
cover_artist =
country =United Kingdom
language = English
series =
genre =Historical novel
publisher =Faber and Faber
release_date = May1977
media_type = Print (Hardback &Paperback )
pages = 128 pp
isbn = ISBN 0-571-11125-4 (hardback edition) & 0571147054 (paperback edition)
preceded_by =
followed_by ="Abba Abba" was published in 1977. It is English writer
Anthony Burgess 's 22nd novel.The theme is the last months in the life of
John Keats .Plot summary
In Part One, the poet has various adventures, meeting the Roman (dialectal) poet
Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli in theSistine Chapel , andPauline Bonaparte , sister ofNapoleon , in the Pincio.Part Two consists of about seventy (from a total of 2,279) amusingly blasphemous sonnets by Belli, purportedly translated by one "Joseph Joachim Wilson", a descendant of the Roman man-of-letters Giovanni Gulielmi (a character in Part One).
An elaborate passage describes how the Italian Gulielmis were transformed into English Wilsons "during a wave of anti-Italian feeling occasioned by alleged ice-cream poisoning in the 1890s in the
Lancashire coastal resorts ofBlackpool ,Cleveleys , Bispham andFleetwood ". "J. J. Wilson" is a thinly veiled "John Anthony Burgess Wilson".Characters in "Abba Abba"
*
John Keats – the poet
*Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli – the Roman dialectal poet
*Pauline Bonaparte – Napoleon's sisterTrivia
"Abba Abba" is the epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone, behind which the vessel with his remains is kept, in Monte Carlo.
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