Abba Abba

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. In Part One, the poet has various adventures, meeting the Roman (dialectal) poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli in the Sistine Chapel, and Pauline Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon, in the Pincio. Part Two consists of about seventy (from a total of 2,279) amusingly blasphemous sonnets by Belli, purportedly translated ... more

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. In Part One, the poet has various adventures, meeting the Roman (dialectal) poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli in the Sistine Chapel, and Pauline Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon, 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 of Blackpool, Cleveleys, Bispham and Fleetwood". "J. J. Wilson" is a thinly veiled "John Anthony Burgess Wilson". "Abba Abba" is the epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone, behind which the vessel with... less