Pam's Book 5: A Clockwork Orange

This book has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. It's sat on my bookshelf in Rockville, MD, two bookshelves in Melbourne, FL, and one in Merritt Island. Every time I browsed my shelves for reading material, I deliberately bypassed A Clockwork Orange. I expected it to be dense, hard to get through, graphically violent, and, most of all, impossible to understand as a result of the invented slang. The book met none of these expectations. I'd heard that you couldn't get through A Clockwork Orange without a lexicon because so much of the language was completely fabricated by Burgess. I wish I could remember specifically who told me this so I could inform them what dumbasses they are. Yes, many of the words were unrecognizable; however, Burgess always threw in plenty of context clues. He says in the preface to this particular edition that the purpose of the language was "to muffle the raw response we expect from pornography" and that it "turns the book into a linguistic adventure." I found both to be true. "The old in-out-in-out" is certainly less harsh than "rape" (although more graphic, if you think about it). I enjoyed learning this new lingo, and the pleasure of discovering what the words meant. Sometimes the meaning was immediately obvious; sometimes it took several uses. But you were never left completely hanging.

I disliked the main character in American Wife because of her moral ambiguity; I empathized with the main character of A Clockwork Orange in spite of his moral turpitude. Alex is a terrible person, an utter sociopath who takes extreme pleasure in committing, viewing, and fantasizing about violence. Even qualities that should, ordinarily would, be redeeming, like his passion for great classical music, are not. While lying in bed listening to "Ludwig van," Alex narrates his thoughts and actions as follows:
"...and then the human male goloss coming in and telling them all to be joyful, and then the lovely blissful tune all about Joy being a glorious spark like of heaven, and then I felt the old tigers leap in me and then I leapt on those two young ptistas." He then proceeds to rape the two young girls.

Yet I somehow connected to Alex. I didn't want him to get arrested, I didn't want him to be tortured, I didn't want him to be recognized for what he was. I rejoiced in his redemption in the 21st chapter that was left out of the original American edition and Stanley Kubrick film (all of this is in the preface by the author, so I don't feel bad mentioning it here), yet I would also have been just as happy had the book ended as it did originally here in the States.

Some philosophical musings from the book:

"But, brothers, this biting of their toenails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop? If lewdies are good, that's because they like it, and I wouldn't ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. And I was patronizing the other shop."

"Choice... He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice."