In which the author writes a second part of a confession starting at the point in his life where he has been told he has a year to live. If we have read the first part, we know that he has been published already and done a couple of stints in SE Asia - one in Malaysia and another in Brunei. Burgess comes across as a slightly bitter old man, but manages to be very funny in the process. In this part of the autobiography, he tells us the of the trials and tribulations attached to becoming "a personality." ( )

I love to read about the author and his difficulty in dealing with the civil authorities in Malta. (I can not remember if this episode was contained in volume 1 or in volume 2, as I am reviewing both of them more than 10 years after originally reading them.)
In the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, a fantasy was propagated about the good life to be had by moving from the drab country that one lives in, to an exotic climate in a more southern country. Greece, France, Italy, Spain, North African countries, Asian countries, were all prime destinations that you heard about from backpacker types who were able to escape from their everyday existence. Or from slightly more established types with a young family and who were able to have a bohemian existence elsewhere (e.g., Mordecai Richler). The accounts themselves usually did talk about the good and bad, without ignoring the tricky parts of a foreign land.
But if I can speak for both myself and for other readers for whom the same thing may have happened, as soon as I closed the book after reading the last page, my fantasy life took over, and I imagined living somewhere else as the ideal way of abandoning all of my current commitments here at home, including family.
Of course Anthony Burgess would have never had any truck with such goofy ideas. He was never one to get carried away with silly fantasies. Not to say that as an artist, he did not understand the importance of fantasy as a part of everyday life.
But I would say that by simply recounting both the good parts and the bad parts of his sojourn away from another country that was getting on his nerves--Great Britain--he was able to get a taste of what Maltese bureaucratic nightmares were like, as a change of pace form English bureaucratic nightmares.