a clockwork orange

".. I mean it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness."

.."Europeans who translated the title as Orange Mécanique could not understand.. and they assumed that it meant a hand grenade, a cheaper kind of explosive pineapple." haha!

i just read this book today and it is a hoot! damn interesting. for one thing, the language is all twisted and he uses words from an invented speech that's really nonexistant. so right from the first paragraph i was puzzling out what in the world is a 'droog' and 'skorry' and 'peet' and 'veshches'. and the amazing thing was, in no time at all, you actually begin to get the meanings from the context itself, so i quickly made up my mind that 'droog' is friend, 'skorry' quick, 'peet' drink and 'veshches', shit. whether it's 100% accurate i duno, but it makes it all the more intriguing that here is a book which a third of the meaning is entirely up to me to decide.

Burgess said he did it because 'It is not a novelist's job to preach; it is his duty to show. I have shown enough, though the curtain of an invented lingo gets in the way.. Nadsat, a Russified version of English, was meant to muffle the raw response we expect from pornography. It turns the book into a linguistic adventure. People prefer the film because they are scared, rightly, of the language.'

Well i found it delightful, if downright exasperating.. I would love to watch the show; I've to see about getting my rooks on it. Hands. haha.

If you need more reasons to pick up this book.. It's all about this vicious youth Alex who gets his nightly highs thrashing and robbing and raping and killing, and one day his droogs betrayed him, and landed him in Staja (State Jail). In there, him and his cellmates brawl half in self defence but when he accidentally kills the offending chelloveck (criminal), they finger him again and he's taken away by state authorities. They put him through a hellish reform program, chemically triggering him to get puking sick everytime he sees violence. Finally the reaction is ingrained and just the thought of being violent makes him sick. He's released 'cured' but incapable of making his own decisions as to be good or bad. Misfortune after misfortune befalls him, and by the end of the novel you can't help but like this irascible, strangely redeeming character.

it's a pity that stanley kubrik's film version leaves out the ending that's played out in the very last chapter, cos the first US version of the book was published without it. it's the last chapter that does justice to the whole book; when i finished, i was smiling for a good five minutes..

verdict? this is one you shouldn't miss. (unless of course the whole bloody world's gone and read it and i'm the last belated fool to wax lyrical on it..)