A Clockwork Orange

5.0

I've already seen the film by Stanley Kubrick a couple of times before reading this book. The film version is one of my all-time favorite films and it's just one of those films that resonated with my soul. I then Googled the book online and saw that it's less than 300 pages, so I ended up reading the entire novel in a single night. Here's what I think for this amazing book:

This is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read. Ingenious in the way it is written, executed, and created. Anthony Burgess created a fascinating, gruesome world, in which he sucks you right in leaving you feeling sick to your stomach but intrigued nonetheless. He created an entirely new language, confusing you and entertaining you all at the same time. I was at first very confused and put off with the slangs used, and it was hard understanding all the words and making sense of it, but soon enough you get the hang of it and you start to enjoy reading it. You would think that it would be impossible to write a book about a 15-year old rapist/murderer and somehow have him come out as a sympathetic character. Burgess has achieved that remarkable feat in this book. The genius of it is in the use of the first person and in the use of slang to give voice to Alex. The slang also serves to make the violence almost comical as instead of kicking someone in the mouth, Alex describes “giving a tolchok into the rot and knocking out a few zoobies”. So even though the book is full of violence and ~rape~, the language removes us from it in such a way that the book feels less violent than it is.

The story itself is a fairly simple and fast read. If you have seen the film then you already know what happens in the book. Alex and his friends commit violent crimes, Alex gets arrested, he gets cured of his violence and then gets cured of the cure. The movie follows the book almost EXACTLY!

Nearly forty years after it's first publication, Burgess' controversial novel still stands as a masterpiece. Burgess himself thought that this book is overrated. He said that there were other books that he would rather have been remembered for, but I don't agree. This is brilliant on every level. A Clockwork Orange is a deep exploration of good and evil, with the conclusion that it is better to choose to be bad than to be forced to be good. In other words, man's free will must be protected at all costs, and we mustn't curb our nature so that we become little more than a machine - we mustn't become like “a clockwork orange”.

A Clockwork Orange changed the way I look at literature for it provides a balanced look at life and the decisions we make. It makes a statement more so than just tells a story. It exposes human emotions, the darkest parts inside of us that we keep hidden from us all. Upon finishing this novel I was forced to reflect on it and ask myself, “aren't we all the same?” and it's a question I feel this novel addresses well.

This is one of my favorite quote from the book: “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? Deep and hard questions little 6655321.”