Anthony Burgess
Published 1962
William Heinemann
I had some idea of what to expect when I read this, having seen the film.
This is labeled as sci-fi, and I guess that if I had to classify it in the contemporary genres we think of a bookstore having, it would probably fit there best.
But it would be right next to PD James' The Children of Men, in that it isn't sci-fi in the classical Ray Bradbury, Heinlein style.
Burgess takes a few elements of reality, and embellished the shit out of them. Which, outside of romance novels, typically takes place in sci-fi.
A word on the Nadsat slang-- do yourself a great favor and DO NOT use any glossary attached to whatever edition you happen to have. DO NOT look words up on the web. Just read the book the way the author intended. You'll get it all just fine. Burgess never gives you more than you can handle.
Unless you're one of the few people who actually look up every single word they don't know the exact definition to, you base a lot of your reading on context clues anyway. If you are one of those folks, then I implore you to just let it slide for a while and appreciate the work Burgess put into not just telling an outstanding story, making an outstanding statement about choice and redemption, but also creating another dialect. His original edition didn't include a glossary. He did that for a reason.
Another thing I would recommend is to read near a computer connected to the internet. I found that A Clockwork Orange expanded my appreciation for classical music. Because I chose to investigate what Burgess wrote about, I was exposed to composers I had never heard of before, and pieces of music I knew I enjoyed, but to which I didn't know the name.
It was an enjoyable and engaging story. We don't see a lot of characters develop, but the ones we are involved with as an audience are deep and wide.
I must warn (and entice) you. Stanley Kubrick treated two things very differently on screen than Burgess did on Paper: Sex and Alex's future.
And this, O my Brothers, is the last slovo thou shalt viddy from thy Humble Narrator on this topic. My rookers are tired of this rabbiting, if you'll pardon me, I think I'll itty off to another mesto and slooshy a bit of the old Ludwig van.
Crank it up:
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