A Clockwork Orange
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4.5 • 110 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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."
Customer Reviews
This is worth the cutter
This was another case of the novel being better than the movie. I’m a huge Kubrick fan but this is really quite a book. The reader is fantastic in every sense of the word. A proper read this one.
More than the movie
A must listen ! The book has so much more than the movie and is awesome
Just buy it. Trust me.
Most of us fell in love with the shocking weirdness of the Kubrick film but what you miss is the exquisite construction of language that Burgess employs to create a voice that is utterly unique. His Nadsat slang (brought to life by masterful narration) is somewhat Shakesperean in it’s inventiveness but it also works like the Lewis Carol poem, Jabberwocky, in that the ‘gibberish’ is is translatable because of the context and construct. At one point I felt like I had learned a new language and was already conversant in it.
Something else the book gives you that the film could not is the unreliable narrator. Little cracks emerge in Alex’s world that let the light of a much darker reality shine in and our jaunty narrator smirks with misguided confidence as we see how he has misjudged his own cleverness.
If you can negotiate your way through the slang you will love this book.