Product Description

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. But in the streets of CastitaÂ’s capital, where a wild religious festival is in full swing, a series of bizarre encounters - including his own repulsive doppelgänger (the son of a circus bird-woman) - and disturbing family revelations await Miles, who soon finds himself a willing victim of dynastic destiny. A darkly surreal comedy of dazzling linguistic inventiveness, MF is an outrageous tale of blood, lust and the machinations of fate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #165489 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

About the Author
Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. His other works include A Clockwork Orange (also available as a Penguin Modern Classic), Inside Mr Enderby, Enderby Outside, Tremor of Intent, Nothing Like the Sun and Man of Nazareth. He died in 1993.

Customer Reviews

Read. This. Book.
Read. This. Book.

Deeply compelling; richly ambiguous; full of clever devices and word plays that reveal themselves only partially, if at all. As with Burgess elsewhere, this stands out for its refusal to disclose which of the many voices is that of the author, which fable is intended as the moral, if a moral is intended at all. It would presumably be labelled postmodern for its mutiple narratives and self-reflexive tone, but the playfullness and complexity of Miles Faber's journey is never plied simply for the sake of it. The extraordinary language and style is anchored to the core of m/f in a way that cannot be said of other works, however brilliant. In ways an incestuous twin to A Clockwork Orange, I get the feeling that I will be mulling this over for quite some time.

m/f
A really good book, I was drawn to it by the title of "modern classic", because I'm snobbish that way, and I wasn't disappointed. A very entertaining read which I actually prefered to A clockwork orange. Although some of the extraordinary machinations of fate contained within are rather Dickensian, to put it lighly, it is none the less a wonderful book. A widely unknown, but brilliant, classic. I recommend it to everyone.

Bizarre (with a small "b") adventure
Miles Faber rebels against the sensible ones around him and embarks on a kind of pilgrimage to a ficticious Caribbean island in search of an obscure artist. When there, his adventure takes all sorts of surreal twists and turns, the major one being coming face to face with his doppelganger, who, although being physically identical to him, is his complete opposite when it comes to personality. It's a humorous, fast-paced, bumbling odyssey of a book, full of oddball characters and slightly unbelievable happenings. There's also a load of double meanings hidden throughout the text, which if it wasn't for the foreword I don't think I would've "got", but I don't think any of that really matters. Entertaining.