Last week, I officially finished reading "A Clockwork Orange." I loved it. It's with my distinct pleasure to award it the title of "First novel in years to actually hold my interest from cover to cover." Kind of an awkwardly long title for an award. But that's exactly what "A Clockwork Orange" did. It held my interest and that's quite a triumph for any book.

The plot is beautifully constructed and provides plenty of twists to keep the reader not wanting to blink. Yes, an excellent plot and chilling twists. This is all wonderful, but what truly kept me interested is the graphic and uncensored nature of this book. Burgess leaves nothing out, and the only thing that mildly hinders one’s understanding of exactly what’s going on is the nadsat-ridden dialogue. Still, you get used to nadsat and catch on what’s what real quick. So when Burgess wants to tell the reader that Alex and his “droogs” are beating up on a hobo, he says something like, “So we cracked into him lovely, grinning all over our litsos, but he still went on singing. Then we tripped him so he lay down flat and heavy and a bucketload of beer-vomit came whooshing out. That was disgusting so we gave him the boot, one go each, and then it was blood, not song nor vomit, that came out of his filthy old rot. Then we went on our way.” Horrifying. Absolutely horrifying, but you just can’t put the book down. You’re so shocked that you just keep reading.

Anyway, I’ve begun reading this new book called “Things Fall Apart,” by Chinua Achebe. Clockwork’s a tough act to follow but this one seems to be holding its own. From what I’ve read so far, it really goes into depth about human emotion and how fear acts as a driving force for humans. A majority of the plot is about missionaries and colonial influence trying to reshape the tribes of Africa. Hence, the title came from this poem about a sphinx-like beast coming to destroy civilization. The European colonizers are related to this beast in the novel. So far, I’m not liking it as much as “A Clockwork Orange,” but it’s really too soon to tell. I'm sure the book picks up with the coming of the colonizers.

Oh well, goodbye Clockwork =( , hello new book. =)

Spoiler Warning: Don't read this if you haven't yet read "A Clockwork Orange."


Other than setting the tone and giving a bleak description of society, I had no idea what the heck this book was actually about until recently. Up until this week, the entire book consisted of random acts of "ultra-violence" described with exact precision so the reader can get a vivid and often disturbing image in his head. So what were Burgess's intentions for all of this violence in the first half of the book? Well, as sick as it may sound, that made the book very intriguing. As Edward Tanguay says in his review of the novel, "The reader is shocked and upset and wants some kind of explanation, wants to see the reasons for this violence. You wait for Alex or some of his friends to show some kind of repugnance towards the violence they are committing, but they do not. It is all out violence with no moral significance attached." (Tanguay, 1996). The book, has however, picked up quite a bit; there's been a shocking twist in the novel, and our once violent Alex is now docile as ever. This drug-induced kindness is a result of an experimental process called the Ludovico Technique, implemented by the government to "cure" criminals of their horrific behavior. It's only once I hit this point in the novel that I realized what the title meant.


"Clockwork" implies the mechanical, robot-like submission of the main character after the government uses a combination of drugs and movies to make him allergic to his own violent tendencies. Every time Alex even imagines a violent act, the drug that flows through his veins automatically sickens him. He is no longer capable of making an ethical decision; the drug influences his every action. At first I thought that the "orange" was perhaps because often prisoners will wear orange jumpsuits and seeing as how Alex was a prisoner, it would make sense. No, not at all. Way too much of a stretch. The "orange" component actually comes from an old English expression: "as queer as a clockwork orange," meaning crazy. According to this article from Yahoo, many have interpreted that "the title craftily blends the automatic (clockwork) with the organic (orange), which is appropriate considering the profoundly screwed up mind of the main character, Alex" (Yahoo, 2005).


This story reminded me of "1984" seeing as how they're both stories of unruly people getting "straightened out" by the government. This book's been great and I'm really upset that within a few chapters it'll be over. But I will definitely read it again sometime and I know this is kind of a pointless statement considering the very first thing I said in this post, but for those of you haven't read this brilliant novel, I suggest you do. You won't regret it.

The Bizarre Language of "Nadsat"

From the very first page of "A Clockwork Orange," the reader is greeted with a barrage of unfamiliar terminology, often difficult to pronounce and understand. This makes the book nearly incomprehensible at first glance, but as one reads on and repeatedly encounters the strange words, the brain learns to automatically translate them; for instance, it becomes almost second nature to take a word such as "chelloveck" and understand it to mean "man, person, or fellow." For the words that one sees less often and forgets the meaning of, luckily there is an online dictionary that has a listing of every slang, non-English word in the book. Although difficult to deal with, these words make the story unique and Anthony Burgess (the author) succeeded in his intentions of making the book more interesting with this crazy lingo.


However, the uniqueness wasn't his only reason for using the alien jargon; Burgess wrote this story during the 1960s, a time when the United States and the U.S.S.R. were becoming superpowers. A majority of the bizarre words are taken from the Russian language and slightly tweaked to create a fictional language called "Nadsat." Russia's influence on the world during the time this book was written is shown clearly in the language spoken by characters.