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A review by borisignatievich
Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Burgess
5.0
About the 5th time I have read it and it is fantastic. One of my favourite books. The first thing to mention is clearly the language, nadsat. The entire book is written in this, a futuristic slang that is heavily derived from Russian (Khorosho is Russian for good, which becomes horrorshow as just one example). The first time I read this the first few pages were a bit of a slog, trying to figure out what the slang words meant. However, it is an incredible use of language imo, and everytime I read it I find that I don't even bother translating it into normal english. It's just words that mean things, and is so effective that occasionally when I read it I think about something outside the book and it creeps in there.
The story itself is, in Burgess' own words, "a sort of Christian allegory of free will." It focuses on a kid Alex, who leads an unruly life beating the sh*t out of people and raping girls for laughs, until he's caught by the police. He then has the ability to choose in a moral dilemma, and the book attempts to address whether to be called good you must have the ability to choose evil or not. I'm not really too arsed about the philosophical implications to be honest with you, but it's a fantastic story, with characters you empathise with in spite of the fact they are, when you look at it, fairly dispicable people.
10/10
The story itself is, in Burgess' own words, "a sort of Christian allegory of free will." It focuses on a kid Alex, who leads an unruly life beating the sh*t out of people and raping girls for laughs, until he's caught by the police. He then has the ability to choose in a moral dilemma, and the book attempts to address whether to be called good you must have the ability to choose evil or not. I'm not really too arsed about the philosophical implications to be honest with you, but it's a fantastic story, with characters you empathise with in spite of the fact they are, when you look at it, fairly dispicable people.
10/10