Just leave the Milk Bar to go bonkers

Not as awesome as expected
A classic, probably a bit overrated book, and one of the rare cases in which I would say that the movie is better than the book. The most unnecessary thing was to add an extra chapter at the end that took the flow, logic, and atmosphere out of the whole thing. Nice development of an own language, but also not as cool as other examples. The whole dystopic brainwashing idea is one of the best elements.

It reminds me of many overrated classics that form 3 stages or categories of boredom.

Books that for no understandable reason have to be read in school, depending on the country's culture, and are mainly focused on the bad, outdated, old, very long time dead, writers of each country, so that there are individual purgatories for young readers in each state.

Nobel prize, nothing to add, the same with peace and economics, it´s just a bad joke. But many don´t seem to get it and take it seriously.

Be creative without caring about conventions
Clockwork Orange is in the third category: Books that use complex, not absolutely logical or even not for the author understandable, unstable plots and inconsistent ideas to be progressive, provocative, and sell more by activating the bite reflexes of conservatives, bigots, and philistines and give nothing on the thousands of years old conventions of writing for the pleasure of the reader. I´ve read much of all 3 categories and must say that it´s the same as with modern art: If there is no recognizable concept, many others could do the same, and if it´s not universally acclaimed a masterpiece, it´s probably average or completely inexplicably overhyped trash.

One hit wonder if average ratings of the author´s other works aren´t that thrilling
Clockwork Orange is one of the better ones, but it would be nothing without Kubricks´adaption, and looking at the general ratings and popularity of all of Burgess´other works, one can see the picture of a one hit wonder.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

4.0 Stars
This was such a unique dystopian classic. I worried that all the slang language would make the story difficult to understand but it was an incredible readable novel. In terms of content, this was ultra violent with some incredibly vile unlikable characters. So of course I loved it. I highly recommend it even if you don't read a lot of classics. This certainly had modern appeal.

4 stars

n  n    It may be horrible to be good. [...] Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?n  n

The audience and the intended affect:

A Linguist's goldmine
A Russian's source of confusion
A Brit's comedy
A Psychologist's topic for conversation
A composer's pride & joy
A criminal's nightmare
My one brain cell's reason for suicide

And this gal's

This is a dark, compelling read with massive amounts of violent acts and imagery that run throughout the novel. They are definitely vividly described but in one way the violence is slightly censored with the use of the nadsat language, a language teenagers use in the novel. The book doesn't promote violence but instead explores the idea of violence entwined with youth and the morality of free will.

The nadsat language is a little confusing and irritating at the start but with the help of an online reference I quickly remembered what meant what and at times it was easy to decipher the word. The nadsat language quickly grew on me and enriched the narrative of Alex, an aggressive, vicious 15 year old boy who enjoys beating, raping, robbing and killing or any other criminal activity. I enjoyed his narrative as he continuously addresses the reader "O, my brothers," his narrative is interesting as he is a complex character as he is incredibly brutal but is also intellectual as he greatly appreciates classical music such as Beethoven's ninth symphony. His character takes intriguing turns especially at the end when he goes through a drastic change.

This book is definitely one of my favourites as the nadsat language immerses you into the dystopian world and actually makes you think more about what is being said. The story is full of surprises and twists with riveting concepts like whether it is better to choose to live a terrible life full of heinous crimes or forced to be good and abide by the law. This book makes you question society and moral instinct and aids you in fully understanding what is being said with its unique language.

This book is one of the most unique and strangely written stories ever. The story follows a group of delinquent youths living their narcissistic and reckless lives. They pretty much do whatever they please including drugs, fighting, stealing, raping, and malicious assault.

Things get real one night when they burglarize an elderly woman and accidentally kill her. The main character and narrator, Alex, is sent to prison where he undergoes behavioral modification and aversion therapy.

Afterwards he's released back into society and the challenges continue as the plot progresses.

The challenge was having to constantly look at an online Nadsat glossary to translate. Come to find out Nadsat is a weird combination of Slavic and Russified words. So when the youths say "It's real horrorshow" they are actually saying "хорошо - transliterated into harasho" which is Russian for "good." That's just a small example of what you're up against when you read this. One of my favorites and I really enjoyed this book. Thanks!

n  ‘If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.’’n

Anthony Burgess's groundbreaking novel, A Clockwork Orange, is a haunting and unforgettable exploration of morality, free will, and the nature of violence.

Set in a dystopian future, the story follows Alex, a charismatic but deeply disturbed young man who leads a gang of thugs in a campaign of senseless violence and chaos. Burgess's writing is both brilliant and disturbing, vividly conveying the horrors of Alex's world. The novel's unique and unsettling language, "Nadsat," adds to its unsettling atmosphere, further alienating the reader from the familiar and creating a sense of uneasy detachment.

n  ‘Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.’n

After Alex is captured, he undergoes a controversial experimental treatment called aversion therapy, which aims to cure him of his violent impulses. However, this treatment raises profound ethical questions about whether it is right to force someone to become good. Burgess explores these themes with unflinching honesty, challenging the reader to confront the darkness that lurks within us all.

Alex's journey becomes a chilling tale about the dangers of totalitarianism and the importance of preserving our own humanity, even in the most extreme of circumstances.

Yes, a Clockwork Orange is a difficult read and at times deeply disturbing, but it is also an undeniable masterpiece that forces us to confront our own prejudices and fears.

I Highly Recommend.

Özgür birer birey olduğumuzu sanırız ve bu yanılsama bize öyle verilir ki gerçekten bir özgür yaşamın nasıl olduğunu tahayyül etmekte açıkçası zorlanırız. İktidar mekanik olarak (Foucault'dan yararlanarak bunu yazmak isterim.) birey üzerinde bir Göz'ün varlığını biyopolitik bir yapı ile işlediği için sürekli gözlemleniyoruz hissi tümüyle hakimdir. Zaten modernitedeki tüm araçlarda buna hizmet etmiyor mu sanki? Bunun ile birlikte seçme hakkından mahrum bırakılmış bireyler yaratır ve bizi öyle bir yanılsama ile baş başa bırakır ki sanki içinden çıkılmaz seçenekler ile karşı karşıya bırakılmışız sanırız. Hayır! bize birçok seçenek sunulup özgürce bir irademiz kullanılması sunulmamıştır, bize iktidar egemen sistemin varlığını devam ettirecek seçenekler sunulmuştur ve bunlardan birini seçmemiz istenmiştir. yani hepimiz birer Otomatik Portakal'a ( Yaşamsal Özne'ye) dönüştürülmüşüzdür. Ve son olarak eklemek istediğim seçmekte olduğumuz şiddet ve suça eğilim bir birey için milattır çünkü suçtan bir önceki yaşam ve bir sonraki yaşam vardır.Hiçbir şeyin eskisi gibi olmayacağını düşünmek yersiz olmaz. Kitapta Foucault'un Biyopolitika izlerini görmek benim için kitabı daha fazla zevk ile okumama sebep oldu. Kitabı okumuş arkadaşlar bağdaştıracak şeyler bulacaklardır. Okumayı düşünenler ise tekrar yorumu okuduklarında ne demeye çalıştığımı daha iyi kavrayacaklardır.

Hmmm.
As far as an enjoyable reading experience goes, I'd say this one is the bottom of the barrel. It's hard to be inside the head of someone who is, for no apparent reason, just an absolutely evil piece of shit.



Now, that's not to say this isn't a worthwhile read.
However, I'm trying really hard to figure out what the point of this book was and coming up with a blank. Like, was there a moral to this story? I don't think so.
The concept was an interesting one, though.
A young psychopath volunteers to get rehabilitated to reduce his jail sentence, never for a moment thinking that it might work.
And it doesn't. Not really. He's still a terrible person, but now when he contemplates anything violent, he gets physically ill.



And the question we are left with is whether or not it would be right to force someone who enjoys raping women and brutalizing the elderly, or really anyone weaker than him, to undergo a form of torture therapy that would make him unable to commit violent acts in the future.
I'm sure there are some people who will disagree with me, but I would say the answer to that is a fairly obvious duh.
If you're not going to kill someone like this outright, which I am also fine with, then I see no problem with castrating their instincts to hurt other people. How is this a problem?
It's not my problem for damn sure.



Does it save their soul? Doubtful. But I don't care about that sort of thing, as I feel everyone is responsible for their own soul or lack thereof. If there is an afterlife, I highly doubt there will be some sort of reckoning or punishment for evildoers. After all, they're only acting this way because of past trauma or some sort of chemical imbalance, right? So if something comes after this, it only makes sense that they'll probably get a second chance to be a decent person.
And now I'm wandering into some kind of philosophical/religious territory better left alone.



In the end, the powers that be feel that what they'd done to him wasn't right, as he had no free will and eventually wanted to kill himself. Everyone felt sorry for him and he was allowed to go back into society with his free will reinstated.
Wow.



This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition and Burgess's introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked." <--was what mine said.
Apparently, the US version was missing a part of the story.
Burgess' originally wanted to show that people change as they get older, and that our young heathen is no different. You see in the final chapter that he doesn't find rape and murder as much fun as he used to and is now contemplating settling down with a nice girl and staying in on Friday nights.
Oh. Um. What?
If we're supposed to take that literally, it just makes zero sense.
Most of us got into a bit of mischief when we were teenagers. But I can honestly say that I never found attacking people for the hell of it part of my good times. And I don't think most people do. Something is desperately wrong with you if that's the way you spend your Saturday afternoon, and getting older isn't magically going to fix it.
Now, if this is simply a metaphor for growing up, growing older, and becoming more responsible? It's maybe the worst one I've ever heard.



This was a weird-ass book, and I'm not sure it was actually very good.
There's no real plot as you're just following along for a fairly graphic ride of torture, rape, and brutalization that ends with a very weak conclusion. The fact that you need to learn an entirely new set of slang to translate this book is only a small annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but it was still an epic irritation to me while I was listening to it.
On the flip side, I can see why this is such a cult classic. There's a lot of shock value to almost every page that holds up even now. The gleeful way he describes drugging and raping the tween girls is something that will stick with me for a while.


Tom Hollander - Narrator
Publisher: HarperAudio
Edition: Unabridged
Awards: Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults
Audie Award Nominee
Listen Up Award

"What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?"

The story of a violent young delinquent and his subsequent rehabilitation is wound tightly through with a juxtaposition of two diametrically-opposed concepts, as the title suggests: the man-made mechanical merged with the heaven-made organic. Is the suppression of individuality justified by the betterment of society? And does the outcome matter if it is not freely chosen?

What's it going to be then, eh?

I was kind of worried that I was going to find this boring or hard to understand but it ended up being a very interesting read. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Tom Hollander and it was a great experience. His performance of Alex was spot on and he nailed the voices each and every character. There's quite a bit of made up language in this book but listening to the audio helped me catch on quickly. I eventually found myself thinking with Nadsat words, haha.

I really appreciated the brevity of this book - it was just long enough to explore the theme of good vs. evil. It was extremely interesting (and kind of horrifying) to read from the perspective of a completely immoral narrator. I wasn't sold on what happens in the last chapter but I kind of liked the conclusion anyway.

...I wish I could write a more insightful review about this classic, but I'm terrible at Goodreads reviews.

Your opinion of this book may well have been decided purely on the basis of whether you read the US version which had  I think the twenty-one chapter version is available now even in the Americas? only twenty chapters or the standard version with all twenty-one chapters.

The twenty-one is symbolic and in that chapter Alex accepts man's estate. We realise that everything that has gone before, the criminal violence, rape and child abuse, was just a phase in his life that he would, in time, grow out of. The moral panic, the fuss, the deprivation of free-will and attempted conditioning was just that, a moral panic and not something grounded in Burgess' vision of a mature understanding of the moral development of a man the development, moral or immoral, of a woman is light years beyond the scope of this novel.

Without that final chapter your lasting impression of the book is going to be quite different.

However, even if all of what we were shown was just a phase we're still left with the victims, who have to cope with the completely unwarranted violence that was perpetrated against them on their own, and with the possibility (certainty?) that this pattern will simply repeat itself every generation.

So we're left with deciding if the authorial vision is a shrug and a hand wave - this is the way the world is, boys will be boys until they become men at the precise second we turn twenty-one or if the author's sympathy is with Alex, whose violent, springtime masculinity is maybe meant to be seen as a physical counterpoint to the explosive music of Beethoven.

The linking of the generally respectable world of classical music with the criminal violence of Alex one of the many jokes in the text, another is that in prison Alex reads the Bible - one of the ideas of Utilitarian prison reformers was that every prisoner would be locked up in strict seclusion with a Bible. Which in silence and privacy they would read and be transformed by, emerging from prison as decent, law abiding citizens. Burgess naturally loves this idea his character Alex reads the Bible and is delighted by the Old Testament - all that sex and murder! And polygamy! His reading validates all his violent and abusive fantasies.

Such old fashioned reprogramming is contrasted with the modern attempt at conditioning this is more effective, and has to be for Burgesses discussion of Free Will, but I wonder now if Burgess goes far enough. Can we really consider Alex as having Free Will before his conditioning either? And even if we do, what about his convertion to a life of responsibility and fatherhood at age 21? Are we not told by the author that is natural - programmed and inescapable part of male nature? But then Free Will seems to me to be an unserious proposition in the first place, so I'm maybe just biased, but we might observe in passing that Free Will is not all that compatible with living in societies which requires a degree of conformity and behaviours to stay within certain bounds.

As an aside to any non-UK readers the slang used by Alex and his drougs is not genuine but was invented, largely from Russian by Burgess. Burgess was taught Russian as part of his national service - the Cold War required uniformed personal who could listen into to the chatter from Soviet tanks on manoeuvres over the radio.

As a further aside - isn't Burgess one of those writers who, apart from this one book, is becoming forgotten and fading out of memory and bookshops?

“I believe that we should read only those book that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it? Because it will make us happy, you tell me? My God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and the books that make us happy we could, if necessary, write ourselves. What we need are books that affect us like some really grievous misfortune, like the death of one whom we loved more than ourselves, as if we were banished to distant forests, away from everybody, like a suicide; a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us."

-Franz Kafka

And what a powerful ax A Clockwork Orange is.