Finished: A Clockwork Orange (Burgess) Hmm. I'm not really sure what to think about this book. It was quite a trip though! Does it belong on the Top 100 list that has been staring me in the face for over 2 years? I'm not sure that it does. Even the author (in the preface) says that this is the least of his works he'd like to be known for, but known for it he is. It's some kind of cult classic, I suppose, that scares me to think that people who read this book actually sympathized and/or glorified the actions of the miscreant, violent, soulless 15-year old  Alex....the "protagonist"...the "anti-hero". Hmm, I say again. I don't think I've ever read such a violent book...though the horror of Lolita comes close to being as unsettling with the constant rape of a young girl by her mother's widowed husband. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex and his "droogs" (one of the made-up words of the nadsat, half-Russian, half-English, half-teenage babble language used throughout the book) roam the streets at night and attack innocent people...violently. (I had to have the urbandictionay.com open on my phone so I could look up words as I went along, and sure enough, most of them were there "from A Clockwork Orange", it would say.) They don't stop at beatings and theft, but continue on with brutal rapes. They get hopped up on drugs and live to be violent. Alex gets caught and sent to prison after an elderly woman dies from his behavior. After two years, so he's now only 17, he is sent to be the guinea pig in an experimental treatment by the government where he is forced to watch the most violent of films over and over, strapped down, and with his eyes forced open by clamps. Injected with a substance that makes him violently ill as he watches the films, his body is literally reprogrammed to reject all things violent...even violent thoughts, because he begins to get violently ill when he starts thinking those thoughts. In other words, he's not a morally changed person...but he's forced to adhere to a certain, simpering behavior to avoid becoming ill. What the doctors do at this facility is cruel and scary, and is a huge statement about the government forcing their own kind of violence. When Alex is released after two weeks of torture and deemed "cured", he tries to go home to his parents, but they have let out his room. He wanders the streets and is viciously beaten by two police officers who turn out to be one of his old "droogs", and one of their former droog enemies. Left out in the country after being beaten, Alex stumbles to a house where a kindly man takes him in and feeds him, etc. He recognizes Alex from his picture in the paper as the inmate who was treated and "cured" and released back into society. The man is pretty off his rocker himself and tells Alex he will become part of his group of people who is trying to stand up to the government. The group uses Alex by confining him in a room and causing him to relive some the music associated with his anti-violence treatment, causing Alex to jump out a window to take his own life rather than listen to any of it for a second more. The group of men stand around him. It was what they wanted....for Alex to die so they could blame the government for what they did to this boy. Alex doesn't die though. He is battered and broken, but he lives. And somehow the broken bones, head injury and/or the subsequent treatment at the hospital undo his "cure" and he's back to his violent tendencies. However, by the famously "left out" 21st chapter, which was included in the book I read, Alex is now 18 and tired of all the behavior. He decides he wants to change, lead a "normal" life...even maybe have a wife and son. Hmm, I still say. Oh, and the nice man who treated Alex kindly is one of Alex's former victims!! At the time of that particular piece of brutality, Alex and his droogs had on masks, so the man doesn't recognize him...but this was the home where they broke in, tore up this man's life's work...a novel in progress called "A Clockwork Orange", beat the man to a pulp, and all brutally raped his young wife. The man now lives alone, he tells Alex, because his young wife died of her injuries from a brutal rape and attack. Alex is taken aback and tries to hide who he is...but that all becomes a moot point since the man is now whacko and wants to just use Alex to get back at the government. Anyway....finally, I read it. I read it pretty fast, so it did hold my attention. I'm just still a bit unsettled to think this is a book in the Top 100.

Just a taste of the nadsat language used constantly in the book:

gulliver = head
listo = face
pretty polly = money
veshch = thing
horrorshow = good
oddy knocky = own (like on my own)
cally = shitty
rot = mouth
rooker = hand
smeck = laugh
tolchock = punch
malchicks = teenage boys
devotchkas = girls
glazzies = eyes
malenky = little
viddied = saw
zoobies = teeth

and this weirds me out because I can remember calling teeth "zoobies" in college, but I never knew why that was slang for teeth. Was is from this book? Hmmm.....