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Summary
Summary
A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. And when the state undertakes to reform Alex to "redeem" him, the novel asks, "At what cost?"
This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition and Burgess's introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."
Author Notes
Anthony Burgess was born in 1917 in Manchester, England. He studied language at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He had originally applied for a degree in music, but was unable to pass the entrance exams. Burgess considered himself a composer first, one who later turned to literature.
Burgess' first novel, A Vision of Battlements (1964), was based on his experiences serving in the British Army. He is perhaps best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, which was later made into a movie by Stanley Kubrick. In addition to publishing several works of fiction, Burgess also published literary criticism and a linguistics primer. Some of his other titles include The Pianoplayers, This Man and Music, Enderby, The Kingdom of the Wicked, and Little Wilson and Big God.
Burgess was living in Monaco when he died in 1993.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After his youthful adventures of raping and pillaging, Alex finds himself in prison. When he volunteers for an experiment, his sentence is commuted to two weeks. The experiment leaves him physically incapable of doing wrong and releases him back into the world. However, when he repeatedly runs into people he has wronged in the past, his real suffering begins. This audiobook gives new life to Burgess's tale of recklessly violent youth, free will and true redemption. While Malcolm McDowell forever infused viewers with the look of Alex in the film, Tom Hollander performs an even more amazing feat. With a smooth, almost lyrical, crisp voice, Hollander delivers Burgess's "nadsat" dialect to readers with such rhythmic cadence that listeners will easily understand the extensive slang used throughout the book. This unabridged production also includes the 21st chapter, which was not dramatized in the film or in the book's original U.S. publication. The audiobook opens with a brief note by Burgess on living with the book's legacy. The final CD features selected readings by Burgess from a previous recorded abridged version. While it's interesting to hear the older and gruffer voice, it does not compare to Hollander's performance. A Penguin paperback. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
Note "performed" rather than "read" - it's the reason I eventually got round to listening to this modern classic, having initially decided that, unlike Kubrick's film adaptation, the book would be gobbledegook. Why? Because Burgess invented most of the language - a mix of rhyming slang, Slavic words and polari favoured by gay 60s showbiz subculture. It's called "nadsat", and is used by Alex, the psychopathic narrator. Here's a taste. Alex (who gets off on violence, rape and Beethoven's 9th) and three droogs (friends), Pete, Georgie and Dim, wearing masks depicting Disraeli, Elvis, Henry VIII "and some poet veck called PB Shelley" on a drunken bender, have broken into a corner shop and are now attacking the owner and his wife. "Dim was round that counter skorry as a bird sending packets of snoutie flying and cracking over a big cut-out showing a sharp with all her zoobies going flash at the customers and her groodies near hanging out to advertise some new brand of cancers. You could slooshy panting and kicking and veshches balling over and swearing and then glass going smash smash smash. I got my rookers round her rot . . . and then she opened up beautiful with a flit yell for the millicents. Well, then she had to be tolchocked . . ." You probably know the story. After aversion therapy, which makes him allergic to sex, violence and classical music, Alex is cured - but only in the English version. Burgess's American publisher, like Kubrick, cut the last chapter, ditto the happy ending. Great performance, Mr Hollander. - Sue Arnold Note "performed" rather than "read" - it's the reason I eventually got round to listening to this modern classic, having initially decided that, unlike Kubrick's film adaptation, the book would be gobbledegook. Why? Because Burgess invented most of the language - a mix of rhyming slang, Slavic words and polari favoured by gay 60s showbiz subculture. It's called "nadsat", and is used by Alex, the psychopathic narrator. Here's a taste. - Sue Arnold.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It may be a sign of a great work that it can be misinterpreted by detractors and proponents alike. Contemporary readers who saw Burgess' 1962 dystopian novel as a celebration of youth violence were as far off base as the teens since then who have thrilled to the transgressive violence it or, at least, Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation depicts. But paradox is at the heart of this book, as this newly restored, fiftieth-anniversary edition makes more clear than ever. Narrated by Alex, a teenage dandy who revels in language (he speaks a slang called Nadsat), music (especially Bach and Beethoven), and violence, especially violence. When imprisoned for murder, he is offered a chance at reform and leaps at it but the reform turns out to be brainwashing, an aversion therapy that, alas, leaves him able to enjoy neither beatings nor Beethoven. Upon his release he becomes first a victim of his victims, then a cause celebre of antigovernment activists before . . . well, publishers offered different endings to British and American audiences, as readers will discover here. What makes A Clockwork Orange so challenging, besides the language ( He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four of us ), is Burgess' willingness to use an unsympathetic protagonist to make his point, which is essentially that it may be better to choose evil than to be forced to be good. (For, as it is put by two different characters: When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man. ) Readers can revisit or discover a classic that, while drawing from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, has in turn influenced authors from Irvine Welsh to Suzanne Collins. Extras include a thoughtful introduction by editor Andrew Biswell, reproductions of manuscript pages annotated by Burgess, and a previously unpublished chapter of a book that was to have been called The Clockwork Condition, in which Burgess intended to set the record straight about his intentions now that Kubrick's film adaptation had made him famous. Readers will learn much, including the meaning behind the book's title. All in all, a fitting publication of a book that remains just as shocking and thought provoking as ever.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Ever since its publication in 1962, all American editions of A Clockwork Orange have omitted Burgess's crucial final chapter; Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film similarly omits the events in this final chapter. But all other editions around the world have included Burgess's defensible denouement, in which his protagonist grows up, bored with violence, and turns to creation himself (marriage, children, even the possibility of music) and completely rejects his adolescent awfulness. Burgess includes an excellent defense of his final chapter in this first US edition to include it, and both the edition and the chapter itself are necessary for proper and complete understanding of his intent in the novel. Hence, even if libraries have an earlier American edition, this one should be added. Burgess has also dropped the ``Nadsat'' glossary added to earlier American editions by the late Stanley Edgar Hyman, maintaining that the contexts make all such usages clear without such assistance. Recommended for all modern literature collections except for those containing any earlier British edition.-P. Schlueter, Warren County Community College