This Week in Reading - Week One

A Clockwork Orange. Horrible, but I like it. At least so far. 

Fifteen-year-old Alex tells the story, and he’s… not a nice person. The book starts with him describing who he and his friends are, and where they are, which is a place called the Korova Milkbar, where they serve milk with “something else.” And that something else is a drug. Or drugs. 

It’s all a bit confusing, really. You see, Anthony Burgess made this book a bit of a puzzle, by making up a teenage slang that Alex uses. It’s making it more interesting, I’ll give him that. But it also led to me making (or attempting to make) my own glossary (my success in this is up for discussion).

Anyway, Alex and his friends, or his “droogs” (I have an inkling of what it means, and it’s probably friends or something, but I can’t help but think it sounds like lackeys… but it’s most likely not that) soon leave the bar. They come across an old man, who’s carrying some books. They ruin his books, beat him up, destroy his clothes and his umbrella, and let him stagger off.

Then they go to another bar, and proceed to spend all their money on some old ladies so they have both an alibi and a reason to steal from a shop nearby. Which they do, sending the shop owner and his wife to hospital while they’re at it. 

During the same night, they have a run-in with another gang, steal a car, drive to a cabin, beat up the man living there, and rape his wife. They push the car into the river and go back to the Korova, where Alex ends up hitting one of his friends because he was being “a bastard with no manners and not the dook of an idea how to comport yourself publickwise, O my brother.” Which I find mildly funny, considering how they’ve spent the night. Then they bicker for a bit, before parting to go home. And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten. 

Now, have oranges or clocks been mentioned? Yes. The man in the cabin was writing a book named "A Clockwork Orange". Now, the back of my book says that the State tries to reform Alex, and the little snippet from the book the man was writing says:

“- The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last rounds the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen – “ (p.18)

I don’t know about you, but it’s making me just a little suspicious… 

As for what I’m expecting next: some more crime, a lot of words I don’t understand yet, and Alex getting arrested.

(Should I sign these? People usually do that, don't they? I didn't do it last time, but maybe I should...)

- Ellen Johanne

(There we go!)



(Edit: I added a page number to the quote because I am an idiot and didn't remember to do it when I wrote the post...)